Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
soil here is rocky, and agriculture is quite tenuous. Many households also participate in the
national sloped-land-conversion project (
tuigeng huanlin
) designed to reforest key water-
sheds; they set aside a portion of their farmland for reforestation in exchange for cash or
in-kind payments from the government, which further constrains the amount of land avail-
able for cultivation.
Fugong County
(
n
= 197)
Lushui County
(
n
= 209)
Paddy Land
†
Land Holdings (
mu
)
0.8
1.7
Dry Land
†
3.6
7.8
Forest Land
6.2
7.6
Household Income (yuan) Agricultural Income
†
27
770
Livestock Income
†
1,606
2,700
Wage Labor
400
544
Self-Employment
*
330
1,265
Government Subsidy
†
544
215
Total Household Income 2,907
5,494
Note
: Independent-samples t-test (
*
significant at 0.05 level;
†
significant at 0.01 level). “Government subsidy” includes
only poverty-alleviation subsidies (
pinkun buzhu
) from the central and provincial governments, not resettlement com-
pensation.
As for most rural residents in China, for Nu River villagers their houses are their most
important source of wealth. The median value of housing among surveyed households was
30,921 yuan (almost U.S.$5,000) for the total sample—21,043 yuan for Fugong County
and 39,921 yuan for Lushui County. Nujiang Prefecture remains one of the poorest re-
gions of China. Within the survey sample, 70 percent of households had been designated as
“poverty households” (
pinkun hu
), which entitled them to receive poverty-alleviation sub-
sidies (
pinkun buzhu
) from the central and provincial governments.
A general sense of uncertainty and ambivalence pervades the perceptions of local vil-
lagers, whose understanding of the hydropower-development projects on the Nu is quite
limited. In fact, most villagers, 59 percent of the survey sample, lacked systematic inform-
