Chinese farmers washed away as Beijing pursues its latest water megaproject

At least 330,000 people were uprooted to make way for the expansion of the Danjiangkou dam in Hubei province. | AFP-JIJI

 

NANYANG, CHINA – Before their villages were submerged beneath a gargantuan scheme to move water hundreds of kilometers to China’s arid north, government officials promised farmers better lives far from their ancestral homes.
Water is due to start flowing this month along the central route of the South-North Water Diversion project, a monumental $81 billion design to salve the thirst of Beijing and surrounding regions.
But many of the more than 300,000 people who made way for it have been left unemployed in leaking, shoddy houses, while few say they have been given the compensation they were promised.
The grand scheme was dreamed up by Communist China’s founding father Mao Zedong more than 60 years ago, and analysts say the migrants’ plight illustrates just how little megaproject management has changed since his era.
Jia Xinlong remembers pounding rain soaking the ground as an entire village loaded their possessions — generations’ worth of furniture and agricultural tools — onto lorries which would carry them more than 300 kilometers away.
When they arrived three years ago at their new home — a clump of dozens of identical white houses rising out of surrounding fields called Yaojia New Migrant Village — some burst into tears.
READ MORE: