Geography Reference
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dramatic step forward from China's historically inadequate compensation structure, stipu-
lating, for example, that resettled households are to receive sixteen times the value of aver-
age annual income in addition to compensation for housing of the “same scale, same stand-
ard, and same function.”
However, as is often the case, the trouble lies in the implementation of regulations. Just
upstream from the Liuku Dam site, where preparatory work is under way, a total of 144
households from Xiaoshaba Village (literally “Small Sand Bar”) were relocated to New
Xiaoshaba Village in 2007. Although public hearings were held in 2006, most villagers re-
ported feeling intimidated and effectively shut out of the decision-making process. In ad-
dition, when resettlement took place, residents were required to purchase their new houses
at an exorbitant price. More than a year after resettlement, no steps had been taken to al-
locate new farmland to the resettlers, and residents reported a lack of long-term support
programs such as job training, usually considered a key component of resettlement cam-
paigns (Brown and Xu 2010). Much of the land that will be inundated is low-lying, fertile
farmland adjacent to the river—land that supports the cultivation of staple crops such as
rice and corn. As the anthropologist Heather Lazrus has observed, “As much as it is social,
political, and physical, vulnerability is also a matter of representation to which questions
of agency are central: Who is doing the representing, under what conditions, and for what
purposes?” (2009:248).
The final area of vulnerability with important implications for the Nu River relates to the
issue of cultural autonomy. China is a party to the Convention on Biological Diversity, one
of the key outcome documents from the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Devel-
opment, Article 8(j) of which states that each contracting party shall “respect, preserve
and maintain knowledge, innovations and practices of indigenous and local communities
embodying traditional lifestyles relevant for the conservation and sustainable use of bio-
logical diversity” (UNEP 1992). This stipulation is not simply an altruistic appeal to the
international community to intervene on behalf of indigenous communities lacking polit-
ical power. Rather, support of such communities seems at least partly instrumental: with
few exceptions, global biodiversity hot spots tend also to be places with great linguistic and
cultural diversity. Although the precise mechanisms are poorly understood, evidence sug-
gests that cultural diversity and biological diversity go hand in hand, that they coevolved
throughadaptive processes, andthat thepreservation ofoneislinked tothefate oftheother
(Gorenflo et al. 2012). 8
Furthermore, the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UN Permanent For-
um on Indigenous Issues 2007), under consideration since 1985, was finally adopted by the
UN General Assembly in 2007 and enjoyed the support of the Chinese delegation. None
of these agreements, of course, has the status of international law or treaty, and all tend to
be superseded or ignored when they come into conflict with domestic law or when they
stand in the way of important development plans. More tellingly, the Chinese representat-
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