Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
imately 10,000 people; subsidizing employment retraining for 10,000 displaced people;
and subsidizing the enrollment of up to 100,000 people in China's New Rural Cooperative
Medical Care System, which would increase villagers' access to local health-care clinics
(Guo 2008:205).
7
Thegeneralpractice duringresettlement wasoneinwhichtheupperlevelofgovernment
would “practice oversight,” and the local government would “seek truth from facts [
Dui
shang bao gan, dui xia shi shi qiu shi
],” a Dengist slogan that is essentially pragmatic: do
whatever is necessary to make things work, without regard for ideology (Guo 2008:203).
This meant that the provincial government would set the guidelines for resettlement and
compensation, but that the county and township governments would have some flexibility
incarryingthemout.Intheend,theresettlement programfellfarshortofitsambitions.Ac-
cording to Guo's research, villagers with adequate social connections (
guanxi
) to political
officials were able to secure jobs working in the hydroelectric facility or to pursue other
economic opportunities, while most villagers either joined the throngs of migrant laborers
in nearby towns or farmed marginal land plots on steep hillsides without irrigation. Dis-
placed villagers faced long-term difficulties in securing what many rural people think of as
a triad of basic needs: eating (
chi
), clothing (
chuan
, literally “wearing”), and living (
zhu
).
With their land inundated, their income in decline, and the price of grain on the rise, many
villagers who were accustomed to eating rice had to switch to eating corn; one villager
noted, “We're not starving yet, but the food we eat leaves a void in our hearts. After eating
this month, we're not sure what we're going to eat next month” (qtd. in Guo 2008:210).
In regards to clothing, people from nearby villages commented bitterly that residents of
Dam Village could often be seen wearing fancy clothing. In response, one resident of Dam
Village replied, “Our clothing includes leather items worth several hundred yuan. But it's
all scavenged from the garbage bins of those who work in the hydroelectric plant” (qtd. in
Guo 2008:210). Housing for resettled villagers was a chronic problem involving the con-
fluence of ecological factors, the changing winds of political economy, and extremely bad
luck. The initial feasibility studies for Manwan were conducted in the 1980s and concluded
that the government would need to provide about 17.6 million yuan to compensate dis-
placed migrants. However, the government failed to account for the skyrocketing changes
in the economy brought on by Reform and Opening or for subsequent upward pressures
on living costs. The cost of building materials such as wood and cement increased dramat-
ically during the boom years of the 1990s, which made it difficult for villagers to build
houses matching the size and quality of what they were accustomed to, even with housing
subsidies provided by the government. To make matters worse, multiple years of monsoon
flooding caused damage to several villages resettled on sloped land that had been cleared
for housing developments; the houses were condemned as unsafe, and their occupants were
forcedtomoveasecondtime.Primary-schoolstudentsfromonevillage,whoseflood-dam-
