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2008
Bright Sun City’s Dark Intent
By Liu Bai
LIU BAI’S PROLOGUE
S
ince 1993, a year after the Three
Gorges dam was approved by the
National People’s Congress, two
kinds of population resettlement in
the Three Gorges area were officially
sanctioned.1 Either the local government
could take responsibility for relocating
people in nearby areas, on higher slopes
or “in areas that needed to be developed,”
under a policy known as “resettlement
with development,” or individuals
destined to be displaced by the dam
could arrange their own resettlement,
outside of the reservoir area, known as
“relocating oneself.” Under the former,
people would move according to an
integrated, government-organized plan;
under the latter, people would use their
own connections and seek help or receive
invitations from friends and relatives in
other areas to leave and settle somewhere
else. By 2000, when the government
announced that 1.35 million2 people would
have to move to make way for the Three
Gorges dam, as many as 200,000 people
had “relocated themselves” to Hainan
Island, Guangdong Province, Hubei
1
The first resettlement policy was issued on
August 19, 1993 and the second one, or a revised one
based on the first, was issued on March 1, 2001
2
By the end of September, 2006, 1.2 million
had been moved.
Province, Shanghai, and other such places,
including Bright Sun City (Dangyang) in
Hubei, where this story takes place.3
BRIGHT SUN CITY
F
our hundred and seventy thousand
people already lived in Bright Sun
City, located in the Yichang area of
Hubei Province to the north of the Yangtze
River. This was an area about 2,000 square
kilometres in size, three-quarters of which
was hilly or mountainous. The city was
classified as poor and severely lacking in
arable land and resources, according to
standard government criteria.
Though no official meeting sanctioned
any such action, when some enterprising
Bright Sun City citizens learned of the
“relocating oneself” policy they organized
a delegation to travel to the Three Gorges
towns of Yunyang, Zhongxian, Fengjie, and
Wushan. The intent was to lure evacuees
to Bright Sun City with promises of good
living and working conditions, all under
the banner of “working for the country
and sharing the burden of the Three
Gorges Project.”
3
According to stipulations in the Yangtze
River Water Conservation Committee documents,
each person in a household that relocated
themselves had to sign a relocation contract and,
in theory, should receive 25,000 yuan (US$3,100)
compensation.
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2008
Apprehensive and disoriented by their
situation, those living in the dam
resettlement area were moved by the
kindness of the visiting Bright Sun
City representatives. Furthermore, they
generally trusted the government, so
one by one they began to sign relocation
contracts that stipulated compensation
amounts and land allocations up front.
What the Three Gorges dam evacuees
who agreed to move to Bright Sun City
didn’t know was that the Bright Sun City
representatives they so trusted had signed
agreements with local village committees
(from the soon-to-be-flooded areas), who
were also in charge of the relocation
funding. They would pay the Bright Sun
City village committee 500 yuan for each
person that moved and an additional
4,224 yuan per person newcomer for
infrastructure (wells, roads, factories, etc.).
This money would assist the newcomers to
relocate to new homes and find new ways
to make a living in Bright Sun City.
This was called the “Twin Resettlement
Fee.” Though the Twin Resettlement
Fee sounds reasonable, in reality the
relocatees were not told how much was
paid for their relocation benefit and they
believe the funds ultimately disappeared
into office building construction, luxury
cars, and even into private pockets. City
authorities denied it, claiming that the
funds were clearly earmarked according
to government documents and in the brief
period of 12 days, had provided many
benefits for the newcomers, including:
According to my on-the-spot investigations,
these were totally fictitious projects. I
asked the director of the Resettlement
Bureau, Song Tianxue (a Bright Sun City
official), “Where are the projects that have
been built for the benefit of the incoming
people? Which village are they in? What
are their locations? Please point them out
to me.” Smugly nodding his head, Song
replied, “Don’t rush me. What are you so
agitated about?” Then he changed the
subject.
Needless to say, the migrants who moved
to Bright Sun City were concerned that
money went missing and ultimately did
nothing to help them establish new lives,
but rather went directly into the pockets of
enriched Bright Sun City officials. Bright
Sun City attracted 832 migrant households
from the Three Gorges area, or a total of
3,742 people, making it the area that had
accepted the highest number of people
resettled under the “relocating oneself”
policy.
***
At the end of 2001, I went to a small
Beijing hotel called Xikelai to meet
with seven men who had been relocated
to Bright Sun City. Fang Yunchao, Jian
Xinghan, Yang Qingxi and the others had
collected together some money to come
to Beijing to plead their case for proper
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compensation to government officials.4
One of these seven, graying at the temples,
strode into the little room crowded with
people and suddenly fell to the floor.
Kneeling in front of me, he said, “Thank
you for being our saviour, we really can’t
go on living!” Being a reporter, I had only
promised to write a “Confidential Memo”5
after finding out a little about the situation.
The man, whose name was Fang Yunchao,
had been unable to get the relocation
money owed to him after moving to Bright
Sun City and had lost everything.
I showed them the letter from Bright Sun
City’s government. “It’s just total nonsense.
Wait until we go back and can send you
the evidence!” they said.
I noted that all of the migrants, staying
crammed in that little room, were wearing
very clean and tidy clothes. Even if their
T-shirts were full of holes, their clothing
had been properly washed. They said that
it was what was expected of them, being in
Beijing.
to serve six to eight month jail terms for
“assembling people to attack a government
department.” What exactly was this all
about? When would their mistreatment
end? When I went to Hubei in 2007, I had a
chance to hear their stories in full.
Having studied the materials that they
had brought for their meeting with
the authorities, I sent a letter to the
government of Bright Sun City to verify
the facts. The response I received made me
lose hope. Then in the second half of 2003,
just when I had decided to go and find out
more about the circumstances in person,
Fang, Jian and the others came to Beijing
again. They were absolutely furious when
FANG YUNCHAO’S TALE
4
Government at the national level.
5
Mainstream Chinese press articles that
Propaganda Department editors “kill” before
publication (for being too sensitive, revealing etc.)
will often run instead in the “Internal Reference
Report” or restricted newspaper for high level Party
officials’ eyes only. That was the destiny of this
“Confidential Memo.”
2008
Later, having received quite a lot of
information from them and feeling
confident of proceeding further, I went by
myself to Bright Sun City in June of 2004.
Fang, Yang Qingxi and the rest weren’t
able to receive me in their homes–they
had fallen into a trap set by the city’s Party
Committee, and had been condemned
Fang Yunchao (62 years old, illiterate,
farmer)
Background:
The eight people in Fang’s household
used to live peacefully in Xingcheng
Cun (Abundant Village) in Dachang
Zhen (Great Prosperity Town) before
the construction of the Three Gorges
dam. In 2000, they relocated to a place
called Yingxiong Cun (Hero Village),
which was part of Miaoqian Xiang
(Temple Front Township) in Bright
Sun City. According to the regulations,
a family of eight people was entitled
to relocation compensation of roughly
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160,000 yuan. But Fang had only
received a little more than 120,000
yuan.
Fang can still remember the time
he first met the relocation promoter
from Hero Village, who had made a
special trip to Fang’s hometown for a
meeting to persuade the villagers to
move. It took place in an old building,
which was used as the office for the
Abundant village committee. The
Bright Sun City promoter’s name was
Liu. He appeared to be extremely kind
and spoke very softly but convincingly
about the government’s relocation
policies and warned the villagers of
the possible difficulties and hardships
ahead. Many villagers signed contracts
on the spot.
In 2004, after the move, Fang’s family
ended up living in a ramshackle
house that could collapse at any
moment because it was made only
of earth bricks supported by a few
beams. There was virtually nothing
inside the house apart from a light
bulb hanging from the ceiling,
whereas color televisions and fridges
were commonplace in the locals’
households.
I
t is because we trusted the Communist
Party that we stupidly believed his
lies. Before leaving my hometown, the
Abundant village committee assessed my
house arbitrarily as being worth 23,000
yuan and insisted that I buy an existing
three-room house with farmland attached
in the Bright Sun City area. I was told that
the compensation funds for my original
house had been transferred to Hero Village
by the Wushan County government, as
part of my total compensation payment.
2008
But when I arrived in Hero Village, I was
not allowed to move into my new house
unless I paid the previous owner for the
house. I couldn’t work out what was going
on and had no alternative but to pay him
10,000 yuan and ask him to get the rest
of the funds from his village committee,
which was handling my compensation
payment. I was surprised to see the house
owner the next day. He came back to ask
for the rest of the house payment from
me, as he had been told to do by his village
committee. I knew that the Wushan
County government had already given
the Bright Sun City village committee the
compensation money for my resettlement,
so I refused to pay more. Not getting what
he wanted, the house owner locked us out
of the house.
The new area we live in—Bright Sun City—
is under the control of Hubei Province. The
only thing we could do was go to the local
village committee.6 I could not believe that
they all ganged up to bully us. In order to
get the money for my house back,7 I had
to go to the higher authorities. I went to
the Temple Front Township government8
to ask for help, but I got nothing. It was
late autumn and it rained a lot. Eight of
us, my wife and I, my two daughters and
their husbands and my two grandchildren,
6
This was their only course of action
because they came from Chongqing Municipality the same level as Hubei Province.
7
This included the original 23,000 yuan that
his soon-to-be-flooded home was assessed at and
which should have been paid directly to him upon
his move to Bright Sun City, as well as the 10,000
yuan that he was bullied into paying the owner
of the house in Bright Sun City which had been
designated as his new home.
8
Fang went to Temple Front Township
because township governments have more
authority than village governments.
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had to put up a shelter on the street and
sleep under very rough conditions. With
the rain beating down on the shelter and
frogs croaking outside, I felt very sad and
didn’t know how to cope any more. It was
to support the construction of the Three
Gorges dam that I left my own hometown
and came here! Now I didn’t even have a
house to live in. How were we to get by?
For seven days, I ran around trying to get
my house payment back. It was then that
my heart broke and I got rheumatism. As
if that wasn’t enough, the house owner who
had not received his money, ganged up on
me with three other thugs and beat me up
on the street. I was 60 years old and I have
never been so humiliated in my whole life.
It was too much to bear and I didn’t want
to live any more. Only when the village
committee realized that the situation was
getting out of hand did they decide to pay
the house owner. However, there was yet
another condition: I had to thank them for
resolving the issue by inviting the house
owner and the village committee for a
1,000 yuan meal. I swallowed my pride
and agreed to do so in the hope that it
would be the end of my bad luck, without
realizing that it was just the beginning of
yet more torture.
Now, at least, we had somewhere to
live. But soon, another issue arose. We
were only given compensation for six
adults–the compensation for my two
grandchildren had not been paid. It was
over 30,000 yuan, a big sum. I had to ask
for it again. I never expected that I would
end up being locked up in prison as a
result of asking for the compensation due
to my two grandchildren. Our “crime”
was “assembling to attack a government
organization.”
2008
It happened this way. On October 28, 2003,
the mayor of Bright Sun City said that
he wanted to greet the newly relocated
people. Dozens of us, all representatives
of the resettled migrants, arrived at the
City Hall at the appointed time for the
meeting with the mayor. We were then told
that the meeting place had been changed
to the Resettlement Bureau. We had to
rush to the bureau as it was some distance
away and we needed to go through the
downtown area to get there. But our
rush through the city in order to get to
the meeting was then misconstrued as a
demonstration, and called “assembling to
attack a government department.” So we
fell right into their well-laid trap.
We were put into prison in April 2004
and kept there until December. We had
to pay 200 yuan per month for food
in the prison! In the eight months of
imprisonment, I paid 1,600 yuan. If you
wanted to have a meat dish, you had to
pay the special prisoners’ price: 1,000 yuan
for an uncooked pig head and 7,000 yuan
for a 100 kilo pig. But a local farmer could
only earn 50 yuan profit for raising a
pig! Besides, there was also the 10 yuan a
month to watch television. As for medical
care, the rheumatism I got from sleeping
rough when we first arrived in Bright Sun
City became much worse in the prison
and the pain in my back and legs was too
much to bear. When I asked for a doctor,
the warden said pain killers were good
enough for me and didn’t allow me to go
to hospital. I had to pay five yuan to get
one pain killer from them! In the eight
months I was in prison, all my pigs had to
be sold, the land was left untended, there
was no food in the pot, no one to care for
my family, and my wife was in tears the
whole time.
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Bright Sun City’s Resettlement Bureau
and the committee in Hero Village also
cheated me of the money to buy piglets.
They said they would offer me a loan to
set up a pig farm. I needed to pay for the
piglets myself first, they said, and they
would pay me the loan later. But two weeks
after I bought the piglets, I was sent to
prison. I invested 50,000 yuan in the pig
farm and it all went down the drain. Now
not only did I have no money left, I had a
debt of over 20,000 yuan as well.
I didn’t give up. After I was released from
prison, I continued to demand the loan
they promised me and chased after the
compensation for my grandchildren and
the “Twin Resettlement Fee” they owed the
other two people in my family.9 They were
furious. For two years, from 2005 to 2006,
they deliberately cut off my water supply
when I needed it most to transplant rice
seedlings. You simply can’t afford to miss
the transplanting season and this year,
I had to go and ask them for help. They
did come, but with a bulldozer. Within an
hour, they turned my paddy field into a big
swamp. I was desperate for help but ended
up feeling too embarrassed to face any
one.
In May 2007, Fang Yunchao, who
was over 60, had to leave home
to find casual work in Fangxian
County, Hubei Province. In a longdistance telephone call from Lao
9
Whether or not Fang thought the Twin
Resettlement Fee should go directly to him or to
the host village that received dam evacuees (and
many migrants misunderstood this policy thinking
it should go directly to them), he wanted to know
the value of the fee transferred on his family’s
behalf.
2008
Fang, he said to me, “I had neither
money nor land, how else can I
make a living apart from leaving
home to look for casual work?”
WANG LIKE’S TALE
Wang Like (33 years old, high school
educated, farmer)
Background:
Jiuchong Village (Nine-Gullies
Village) is in the town of Yuxi
(Nurture Stream), Bright Sun City.
It is 300 metres east of the highway
between Bright Sun City and Jingmen
(Bramble Gate). This small village
has accommodated over 80 migrants,
about 16 households, and Wang’s
family is one of them. The host village
committee should have received
337,920 yuan in “Twin Resettlement
Fees” to assist in resettling and
employing these 80 people. But who
exactly was in charge of planning
and transferring the funding? Who
managed the whole operation?
B
efore construction of the Three
Gorges dam, we had lived in Great
Abundance Village for generations.
We were not rich, but had our own houses
and land, and as we had more than enough
to live on, we were very comfortably off.
Before we moved here and before we
signed the contracts, the village committee
said they had everything—our new house
and land—ready and that we would get
anything we needed. But after we arrived
here, they did not allocate the 1.5 mu of
land that each of us was supposed to get,
nor did we get the business set-up costs
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and resettlement living expenses, so life
was really hard! I have a big family, and
with so little land per person, the grain we
were able to grow wasn’t enough to feed
us.
From the time I arrived in Bright Sun City,
I farmed “landlord’s fields,” controlled by
the village committee. To be able to farm
this land, I had to sign an agreement with
the village committee. This agreement
was in fact a 20-year-job contract, or lease,
issued directly by the village committee to
resettled landless migrants. These parcels
of land were not taxed by the government,
but in truth the members of the village
committee treated this land as their
“private bank,” pocketing the rent money
or spending it on personal expenses.
These sorts of “landlord’s fields” were very
common in Bright Sun City and places like
Liwan, Tonghu and Mulin villages. Some
village committees controlled 20 or so mu
of these sorts of fields; some had more
than a hundred.
Moreover, we never saw how a penny of
the “Twin Resettlement Fee” was spent. I
dare say that the money went into their
pockets. I’m running a big risk because I’ve
collected some evidence about all of this.
Just have a look at these five “Requests for
Appropriation of Capital Funding” by the
village committee. In the space of one day,
on August 14, 2002, the town government10
approved all five requests, and our migrant
relocation funding was transferred into
their private hands, just like that.
10
The town government is a higher
authority than the village committee, but still
below the county government.
2008
THE FIRST DOCUMENT
Yuxi Town Party Committee and
Government:
In order to successfully resettle the
migrants, and to implement the
policies stipulated in document 40
of the National Yangtze River Water
Conservation Committee’s Report,11
and document 15 of the Municipal
Government Migrant Relocation
Report, 30,800 yuan is required to pay
the difference in funding, amounting
to 6,160 yuan per head, to support
each of five migrants whose status
has changed from “accompanying
migrants” to “resettled migrants”
and who now require the “Twin
Resettlement Fee.” The migrants with
changed statuses have to re-sign new
standard contracts that are similar to
their original contracts. Your approval
is sought for this transaction of which
details are attached.
Jiuchong Village Committee, Yuxi
Town
August 14, 2002
But I ask, who were these five migrants?
What did the officials mean by “support
migrants whose status has changed from
“accompanying migrants” to “resettled
migrants”? Who decided what the payment
would be and how was this decision
made? Who was going to supervise the
implementation? The request doesn’t
mention anything about all of this.
11
This is the report called “Section 40 of the
2001 Yangtze River Water Conservation Committee
Report” referred to at the beginning of the story.
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THE SECOND DOCUMENT
Yuxi Town Party Committee and
Government:
In order to facilitate the livelihoods of
and production by the migrants, 65,000
yuan of funding for basic equipment
is required to build a bridge and a road
dedicated to migrants’ farm work. The
detailed budget is as follows: 45,000
yuan for the bridge (farmland will have
to be used for the purpose); 20,000
yuan for an 800 metre road, including
170 truckloads of sand and cobblestone,
costing between 110 and120 yuan a
truckload. Your review of the proposal
is welcomed and your approval is
appreciated.
Jiuchong Village Committee, Yuxi
Town
August 14, 2002
Again, why was a bridge needed after the
migrants arrived? Where was the bridge
to be built? Who was responsible for
designing and building the bridge? The
proposal doesn’t mention any of the above.
THE THIRD DOCUMENT
Yuxi Town Party Committee and
Government:
In order to successfully resettle the
migrants, and to implement the
policies stipulated in document 40
of the National Yangtze River Water
Conservation Committee’s Report,
and document 15 of the Municipal
Government Migrant Relocation
Report, 11,856 yuan is required to
2008
pay the land fee for house building.
The village charged six relocated
households including Fang Yunzhong
and Liu Yuxi land fees and taxes for
using farmland to build houses. These
fees and taxes should be paid back to
the migrants. Your approval is sought
for this transaction of which details are
attached.
Jiuchong Village Committee, Yuxi
Town
August 14, 2002
But what were the land fees and taxes
charged by the village for using farmland
to build houses? Have the migrants
actually received compensation for having
paid these fees and taxes?
THE FOURTH DOCUMENT
Yuxi Town Party Committee and
Government:
In order to successfully resettle the
migrants, and to implement the
policies stipulated in document 40
of the National Yangtze River Water
Conservation Committee’s Report,
and document 15 of the Municipal
Government Migrant Relocation
Report, 19,413.72 yuan is required to
pay tax owed by the migrants. The total
amount of tax that migrants should
have paid over the last three years is
19,413.72 yuan; 12,256.55 yuan has
been paid, which leaves 7,157.17 yuan
to be paid. Your approval is sought for
this transaction of which details are
attached.
Jiuchong Village Committee, Yuxi
Town
August 14, 2002
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Again, I ask, what was the tax for? Why
should the village committee ask for
the amount of money again when the
migrants had already paid?
THE FIFTH DOCUMENT
In just one day, in five spending sprees,
272,069.72 yuan of the total “Twin
Resettlement Fees” of 337,920 yuan that
should have been spent on resettlement
projects for our 16 households was used
up. There was still 65,850.28 yuan left
in the account book. But this wasn’t the
end of it: 14 days later, on August 31, the
village committee sent another demand.
Only this time it wasn’t called a “Request
for Appropriation of Capital Funding,”
instead it was entitled a “Request for
Funds Required to Meet Migrants Business
Set up Costs in Jiuchong Village.” And
this time, the requesting organisation
changed: it was no longer the town Party
Committee and government but only
the government of Yuxi.12 This time they
asked for 100,000 yuan and said it was
to build a bridge. Although only some
60,000 yuan remained in the account, they
still demanded 100,000 yuan—they had
become totally muddleheaded over all that
spending!
On August 31, we found out about this
“Request for Funds” through an informer
inside the village committee. Twenty or so
of us went to look for the party secretary
and the head of the village and asked
12
These organizations are at the same
level and for the same area. The first five requests
for funds were made to both the town Party
Committee and the government of Yuxi, but the
sixth was made only to the government in an
attempt to duplicate projects and avoid detection.
2008
them to make public how they planned to
use the resettlement funding. The party
secretary scolded me and said I “didn’t
understand the resettlement policies,”
and the head of the village added that
“migrants have no right to have a say in
spending.” We kept asking for the evidence
of how the money was used for the next
four years, but it was never provided. They
became more and more arrogant, calling
us “unruly.” A few days ago, in a special
three-level municipal meeting, the director
of Bright Sun City’s Migrant Resettlement
Bureau, Song Tianxue, said quite openly
that he wanted to “sort us out,” meaning
run us over, get us beaten up, or make
sure that we all came to a sticky end. The
migrants from the Three Gorges were
truly in a difficult predicament!
KUANG ANGEN’S TALE
Kuang Angen (47 years old, junior high
school educated, farmer)
Background:
The four people in the Kuang family
were relocated to Group Four in Forest
Village.
W
hen we migrated to Bright
Sun City they didn’t give
residency permits (hukou)13
to the youngest and oldest people in
the family. Without residency, a person
couldn’t get relocation reimbursement.
So that money went straight into the
pockets of corrupt officials. (Fan Yunchao’s
13
“Household registration” gives citizens the
right to live in a particular spot, work, and receive
social services such as school, health care etc.
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parents, for instance, were here for nearly
a year, but were never given residency
permits, so couldn’t get their resettlement
compensation and finally returned to
Dachang with tears in their eyes. Another
example of this is Ou Xiuhua, who had
already been living in the resettlement
town of Fengshan Village, a part of
Yuyang Town, for seven or eight years.
However his son, Ou Mimi, remained an
unregistered resident without a permit.
When he went to see the director of the
Resettlement Bureau, Song Tianxue, he
was told, “I can’t do anything.”)
Bright Sun City’s Party Committee was
not at all shamefaced about the lies they
told. For example, they kept telling the
higher authorities that they were doing
what had been asked of them, to reduce
the migrants’ agricultural taxes.14 But
what was the reality? All you need to
do is have a look the “‘Hubei Bright Sun
City’s (county and district) Tax Payment
Statement’” to understand what was going
on. I have it here:
To Kuang Angen (migrant), Forest
Village Group Four:
Location for tax payment:
Village Committee
Overdue or late payments:
05% per day fine (a 5/10,000 fine on
a daily basis)
April 21, 2004
As well as agricultural taxes, we also have
to pay a 100 yuan per person head tax, and
also the very vague “Migrant Temporary
Residence Fee,” and so on. Later in 2005,
when we found out that migrants didn’t
have to pay the agricultural tax, they
stopped asking for it, but we had been
paying it unnecessarily for five years. In
those five years, each person had paid at
least a couple of thousand yuan for no
reason at all.
In Herong Town15 the village committee
spent the entire amount of the “Twin
Resettlement Fees,” probably squandering
it and later, when the village committee
cadres wanted to dig a well in the village
and needed to install a transformer—
something that should have been paid for
out of the “Twin Resettlement Fees”—they
borrowed the money from the migrants,
an amount of 20,000 or so yuan, which still
hasn’t been repaid!
According to the “Agricultural Taxation
Regulations of the People’s Republic
of China” and the “Management and
Implementation of Agricultural Tax
Levies in Hubei Province,” a contract
to farm 13 mu of land will incur an
annual tax of 378 yuan, with additional
payment of 76 yuan: in total 454 yuan.
There are four people in my family, and
according to the contractual agreement,
we should have been given six mu of land,
but we were only given a little more than
four mu. Nevertheless, publicly, the city
authorities claim that land was distributed
in accordance with the contracts.
Notice is hereby given that:
When I enquired about the actual amount
14
According to the resettlement policy,
migrants should be exempt from agricultural taxes
for three years.
2008
15
Mr. Kuang is referring to a town in the
same city region where the situation was much
worse.
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of land that was supposed to be distributed
as prescribed in the “Land Management
Contract,” the authorities said that this
document was not the same as the one
that the villages actually used, called
the “Verified List of Relocated Migrants’
Land Allocations.” But according to both
documents, each migrant should be given
1.5 mu of land. The local officials tried to
justify the difference by claiming that the
area of land was calculated according to
standard mu, and that each village and
group had a different standard calculation
of what a mu was, as dictated by historical
Village in Bright Sun City’s Temple Front
Town. There were six of us, my wife and
me, two children and my wife’s parents.
Before we came, they said we could have
six mu of land, but when we got here we
were only given four mu. My fields were
right next to the fields of a local guy
called Li Bailiang. Sometimes he’d try to
cause trouble by picking on me and often
damaged my crops.
precedent. Could there be any more
arbitrary explanation than this? Whichever
way you looked at it, the authorities were
always able to justify themselves. People
ought to say things in good faith, but their
good faith had gone to the dogs ages ago!
and I went to have it out with him, but he
claimed that I’d taken over some of his
land. So, I used some string to mark the
boundary clearly, and asked the head of
the village Party Committee, Li Guofu,
to come and arbitrate. Li Guofu came
and made a scene waving his arms about,
kicking in my direction and shouting. He,
too, accused me of taking over some of Li
Bailiang’s land. Honestly, wasn’t this just a
case of them ganging up together to bully
an outsider? At the time I felt that if they
were going to be unreasonable, I’d have to
find someone who would be reasonable.
I wrote a complaint and went to the
Resettlement Bureau in Bright Sun City to
ask for arbitration. But I got it wrong. They
took no notice, even though I went back to
the bureau several times.
TAN GUIXIANG’S TALE
Tan Guixiang (Tujia ethnic minority, 40
years old)
Background:
After 2006, four members of the
Tan family left for three different
destinations to find work. Only Tan
Guixiang’s wife’s father-and mother-inlaw, then in their 70s and 80s, were left
at home.
I
n 2000, our family moved from a small
town in the locality of Zhongxian
County in the reservoir area here to Liwan
2008
At the beginning of July in 2003, when
he damaged my corn and sweet potatoes
again, I couldn’t put up with it any more
However, I felt that this situation could
not be left unresolved. Who would have
thought that three days later, just when
I had come home from looking after the
cattle as evening fell, Li Bailiang and a
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gang of his young relatives, Li Baifa, Li
Haiqiao and Li Dongsheng burst into my
house. They carried long knives, hoes,
shovels and other tools, and beat me until I
was covered in blood and lying in a coma.
Afterward my family called the police on
110 and emergency services on 120. The
police came, but gave no help whatsoever.
The next day my wife, Zhen Songmei, went
to the police station in Temple Front Town
to report the incident. The security cadres
and police at the station not only refused
to take down the details but also screamed
at my wife to “get out!”
I had been beaten so badly that I had to
go to hospital. In October, when I got
out of hospital, Zhou Heming of the
Public Security Bureau in Bright Sun City
assessed that my injuries had seriously
disabled me. Even though that was his
judgment and our family’s livelihood had
been affected in a very fundamental way
because of my beating, the guys who did
it got off scot-free. My wife went to the
Resettlement Bureau to try and organise
treatment for me, without realising that
the officials in the Resettlement Bureau
were just like the police in the Public
Security Bureau – they were totally
uninterested and they also told her to go
away.
When the hospital stopped my treatment,
the only thing my family could do was to
sell our plough ox to get money for further
treatment. Our two kids also quit high
school. Our younger son was quite a good
student, and before quitting he’d asked me
if I could borrow money so he could finish
junior high. But who would want to lend
us money in the sort of mess we were in?
Even if they did give us a loan, we could
never afford to repay it!
2008
By 2006, I still hadn’t recovered from my
injuries, but four of us went to Guangzhou
to find jobs. Going elsewhere was the only
thing we could do as we had no means of
support in Bright Sun City, but I still miss
home where my wife’s parents are. They’re
in their 80s now, so I don’t feel good about
leaving them, but if I went back to Bright
Sun City, I’d have no way of supporting
them anyway, and now all I can do is send
a bit of money to them each month.
LIU BAI’S EPILOGUE
The director of Bright Sun City’s
Resettlement Bureau, Song Tianxue stated
that the government was instrumental
in designing and putting into action the
relocation of migrants to the area, “To
make every effort for the country and
share the burden of the Three Gorges
dam.”16 Under his leadership, all of the
villages with relocated migrants had two
sets of accounts, one for the migrants to
see and the other just for the perusal of
those in authority. His rationale was: “Some
migrants are very cunning and spend their
whole time trying to muddy the waters.”
On a low level cadre salary (which in
Bright Sun City was about 2,000 yuan a
month), he has been able to get 50 mu of
land and build three beautiful houses for
himself in the six years that migrants have
been relocating from the Three Gorges
area into his area of jurisdiction. These are
photos of the houses he has managed to
get, taken by the relocated people.
16
This is a common government slogan.
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is the third in
a series of oral histories from China’s Three
Gorges region.
Banned and famed Chinese environmentalist
and journalist Dai Qing has organized a team
of journalists to record a remarkable collection
of oral histories from the riverside towns and
villages affected by the Three Gorges dam on
China’s Yangtze River.
is
proud to bring you these uncensored, touching
2008
and often shocking stories. Those forcibly
displaced by the world’s largest hydroelectric
project have been denied a voice for too long.
This collection gives it back.
Translation, editing and online publication
of the series by Chinese author Dai Qing and
Probe International has been made possible
by funding from the Foundation Open Society
Institute (Zug).
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