Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 16, 1995 TAG: 9507170093
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: YICHANG, CHINA LENGTH: Medium
Where the family lived in a whitewashed, mud-brick house is a dusty crater echoing with the distant thump and roar of earth movers building the locks of the Three Gorges Dam. Across the brown river, workers pour cement for a diversion channel that is almost complete.
The Li family was among the first of 1.3 million people who will move to make room for the dam and its reservoir.
The government has promised them - and the country - that the dam will bring big benefits: It will save millions of people from the threat of floods by China's mightiest river and produce 84.7 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity a year, or one-ninth of the current national consumption.
Critics have long argued that the dam will do more harm than good, in terms of its drain on the national budget, social dislocations and environmental damage in one of China's most scenic areas.
But no public debate has been allowed since the legislature approved the project in 1992, when about one in every three lawmakers in the normally compliant assembly voted no. China does not permit criticism of major state-owned projects - particularly not the pet project of Premier Li Peng.
The beautiful Three Gorges, buff-colored, black-streaked rock walls that rise 3,000 feet above the water, will have their lower 300 feet covered by water.
If built as planned, the 11/2-mile-long, 600-foot-high dam will be completed by 2009 and change the flow of the Yangtze.
Eight red Chinese characters, each a separate billboard the size of a basketball court on the southern bank, proclaim the plan: ``Build up the Three Gorges, Develop the Yangtze River.''
The government's latest cost estimate is $27 billion. It plans to try for $5 billion in foreign loans.
Forty percent of the costs - some $10 billion - is earmarked for building new farms, factories, towns and houses.
More than 1,000 factories and the best farm land in the region will be inundated by a 400-mile-long reservoir, stretching from the dam 25 miles west of Yichang, in central Hubei province, to Chongqing, in Sichuan.
``The government doesn't want to cause trouble,'' said Yuan Guolin, vice president of the state-owned China Yangtze Three Gorges Project Development Corp. ``We want the move to go smoothly, so people's lives will be better.''
Li Kaijin and about 100 neighbors left their homes in 1993 and resettled in Yanjiahe, a village outside Yichang that consists of new tiled apartment buildings and two factories alongside a highway and high-voltage power lines.
``Some were hesitant at first, and some grumbled about the compensation, but it's hard to satisfy everybody,'' said Li, 32.
His home is a four-room apartment with cement floors and brightly painted walls on the ground floor of a new three-story building. His brother and family and his father - who also lived in the old farm house with its view of the river, orange and chestnut trees and a pine forest - now live upstairs.
More than 1 million people will be moved over the next decade.
Human Rights Watch-Asia said in a report this year that most will be resettled on infertile and overpopulated hill slopes above their old homes.
Some 3 million of the 10 million Chinese moved to make way for dams since the Communists took power in 1949 still live in extreme poverty.
Yuan contends the Three Gorges project will be different. In addition to lump-sum compensation to individuals, the central government is giving money to local governments for new fields, orchards and factories. City dwellers are to be moved to new cities on higher ground or transferred to new jobs in distant provinces and cities.
by CNB