Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
abiding source of future security. Do powerful interests such as government agencies or
hydropower corporations actively seek to undermine the livelihoods of the poor through a
process of dispossession? Perhaps. But they don't really need to because the existing, am-
biguous property-rights regime has already accomplished that for them.
PEOPLE IN THE WAY
The dismantling of the State Electric Power Corporation in 2002 and the distribution of its
assets to various state-owned enterprises and shareholder corporations constituted an ap-
plication of market logic to China's electric-power sector. As I have already described in
detail, this distribution set in motion a process in which the Five Energy Giants and their
various subsidiaries have come to shoulder many market-driven imperatives: they are ex-
pected to operate efficiently and profitably in order to generate value for investors. In a
fundamental sense, displacement and resettlement to make way for the dams in Yunnan
represent villagers' head-on encounter with the market logic of reform-era China.
Proponents of liberal economic policy tend to attach a range of salutary adjectives to
the market. Whether referring to a specific institution such as a locally owned store or a
Wall Street firm or to a more abstract, idealized concept, the market is often described as
“efficient,” “rational,” “competitive,” and even “free.” But if the market is the only meas-
ure of something's value, then only things readily measured in market terms will show up
on the balance sheets. Nonmaterial assets—the substance of human relationships or the
long-standing attachment to a place and its resources—tend not to be accounted for in any
meaningful way. In Marxist political economy, such uncalculated costs are often referred
to as the
faux frais
of production, the “incidental operating expenses” that accompany any
business transaction but do not add value to the exchange and are therefore willfully over-
looked. Marx argued in
Capital
that dispossession and displacement were not incidental to
the economic development process, but rather central to it: “Along with the surplus popu-
lation [of unemployed workers], pauperism forms a condition of capitalist production, and
of the capitalist development of wealth. It enters into the
faux frais
of capitalist production;
but capital knows how to throw these, for the most part, from its own shoulders on to those
of the working-class and the lower middle class” ([1867] 1984:602-603)
In the process of building a dam, there are various expenditures—fixed capital for in-
frastructure, labor costs, and operating costs, to name only a few—that hydropower-devel-
opment companies and their financial backers justifiably consider productive investments
for which they can expect a monetary return when electricity is sold and distributed on
the grid. For example, the four dams discussed in the Nu River chapter—Maji, Lumadeng,
Yabiluo, and Lushui—have a combined budget of 42.4 billion yuan to cover such expendit-
ures. Of this total, 1.8 billion—a little more than 4 percent—is earmarked for resettlement
