CHINA: The vast Three Gorges dam in China has been sealed, and flood waters are beginning to rise. Over half a million people have to be resettled as a result. Jasper Becker reports from Fengjie, where some locals want to stay put
A plague of giant rats is menacing the residents of the Three Gorges area as officials rush to blow up the last buildings to clear the way for the waters which will begin rising early next year.
"I don't mean mice - they are about this big," said Mr Hong Lijun, holding out his hands 18 inches apart. "Every night I see them. They get into the bedding, tearing up the quilts and stealing all the food they can find."
Mr Hong runs a restaurant in a small village near the riverside town of Fengjie. Most of the lower city has already been demolished. He says rodents are moving out too and are sometimes following people to their new homes.
The government says it has been busy organising rat-extermination campaigns, scattering 120 tonnes of poisoned rice on the ground because of fears the rats could cause an epidemic of leptispirosis, an acute infectious disease than can cause kidney failure and meningitis. Humans get the disease through contact with water, wet soil or vegetation contaminated with the urine of infected animals.
Rats are only one of a spate of problems dogging the world's biggest construction project as the final countdown begins.
In June 2003, the first turbines are scheduled to start producing electricity. To coincide with the 2008 Olympics, the water in the reservoir will rise again from 135 metres to 175 metres, when it can operate at its full capacity of 18.2 million kilowatts.
Earlier this month, the second channel was blocked in time for the opening of the Chinese Communist Party's 16th congress.
"We have to get everyone out by the end of the year," said Mr Liu Fuyen, head of the Chongqing resettlement bureau.
In his province-sized territory carved out of Sichuan province, 550,000 people will have be resettled by the end of December. Officials are hurrying to blow up the last houses and factories and evict remaining residents.
All along the 375-mile stretch of the Yangtze up to Chongqing city, thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, are refusing to leave. Those hanging on are dubbed "nail households" because they refuse to be uprooted from houses or land they have claimed for generations.
"It is just a small minority, although we get a lot of petitions complaining about compensation," Mr Liu said.
In the small rural township of Ganqing in Zhongxian county which is fated to disappear, a crowd of locals shout out their anger and frustration. "They will have to take us away in handcuffs," declares one old man. "We haven't been given any compensation, so how can we move?"
The local government has resettled some of the inhabitants in far-away Qingdao on the coast, and has built a new township 10 miles away on higher ground. But no one is moving there.
The villagers suspect officials of pocketing their money, but dare not stage group protests. A large and visible police presence patrols the area and locals who have tried to block roads or organise marches and sit-ins have been quickly surrounded by riot police.
In a dangerous game of chicken, many residents are hanging on, trying to force the government officials, under pressure to complete the resettlement plan early, to make them a last-minute deal.
"Everyone thinks they've been cheated," says Mr Hong "because the new housing costs two or three times the old one." In Fengjie, a heap of grey rubble sits where buildings used to be. All the towns in the reservoir area look as if they have been carpet-bombed.
As in some war scene, bands of scavengers wander like homeless refugees amid piles of grey bricks, stooping to pick up bits of wiring or wood. Some scrap-merchants specialise in iron and copper, but others have collected doors or window frames.
The weary traveller walks uphill from the ferry boats through a strange market of bric-a-brac, past half-ruined houses where the "nail householders" linger like crazed outcasts in a post-apocalypse movie.
High above can be glimpsed blocks of the new housing, painted in breezy pastel colours. Although it is a vast improvement on the old accommodation, it also costs much more: most residents receive 200 yuan in aid per square metre of their old homes, but need to pay 600 yuan or 900 yuan for a square metre in the much larger houses on offer.
"We can't afford it because we have no jobs," complains one man. Over 100,000 industrial jobs have disappeared in the last few years as over 1,000 factories have closed down. Most inhabitants now subsist on a meagre monthly allowance of 200 yuan.
So far there is precious new investment, despite massive amounts being ploughed into building new bridges, a railway, a motorway, several airports and a number of new industrial zones.
To create jobs, the central government is planning to turn the region into the world's biggest citrus-growing centre and build bottling plants for orange juice.
The peasants who will see their best land submerged are being encouraged to plant orange trees on the steep slopes. In the original resettlement plan, they were to have been given scrub land higher up the mountainsides to terrace, but this was changed in 1999.
In a bid to calm fears that soil erosion would accelerate and wash down the hillsides, quickly filling the reservoir with sediment, the government banned cultivation on slopes steeper than 25 degrees and ordered existing fields to be planted with trees.
Although the townspeople are relocating to newly built towns nearby, as many as 125,000 rural residents are being resettled in distant coastal provinces.
Mr Hong, his family, and 300 fellow villagers were relocated to Fujian province a year ago. There the authorities have built a Three Gorges migrants' village, but he says there was no work because he could not speak the local dialect.
Instead he decided to return and re-open his road-side restaurant for as long as the water does not inundate it. In fact, many of the 125,000 who were resettled out of the area have returned and are camping out, hoping they can stay.
The problems of resettlement are proving far tougher to resolve than when the project was conceived over a decade ago. China was then a centrally planned economy where the state could allocate jobs at will. Now the government is in danger of failing to keep its promise of raising the living standards of the relocatees.
Most of the resettlement funds have been diverted into local government coffers to be spent on infrastructure projects.
The peasants who are losing their land and cannot find city jobs are demanding lump-sum payments instead of vague promises of jobs . In some areas, they have attacked resettlement officers and collected thousands of signatures on demands sent to Beijing.
The central government also underestimated the environmental price tag . The land which is to be submerged is being levelled, but it is littered with piles of decaying rubbish - the most visible part of the area's legacy of 178 waste dumps, 40,000 grave sites and three million tonnes of refuse, all of which will go under water.
THE factories and cities in the reservoir area have been spewing so much filth into the Yangtze that its water, a café latte colour, has long been undrinkable. All the river towns have had to pipe clean water from their own reservoirs built far away from the river.
Chinese environment officials now warn that the millions of tonnes of rubbish and industrial waste left behind threaten to turn the Three Gorges reservoir into a cesspit. Although the government recently set aside an extra $4.8 billion (€4.8 billion) to clean up the river, little seems to be happening.
According to a 1993 survey, carried out before the project started, over 3,000 industrial and mining enterprises in the area annually released into the river more than a billion tonnes of waste water containing 590 pollutants. The river bed is a toxic sludge of dangerous heavy metal.
Premier Zhu Rongji has ordered the closure of 500 of the worst industrial polluters, but the new cities may continue to discharge their sewage into the river.
Many rural factories are refusing to obey the edicts from the capital. Perched on the banks of the pretty Xihe River, which runs into the Yangtze, are cement, salt, paper and textile factories spewing waste that have turned its water a dull grey colour.
"They installed a treatment plant at the hemp factory, the worst polluter around here, but they never use it. They just want to make more money," said Mr Cheng Xuenong a 68-year-old retired worker in the Nanxi township on the banks of the Xihe.
Pollution is not the only new threat. In July, the central government announced a new $361 million (€361 million) fund to prevent what it called geological disasters.
All the steep hillsides are prone to dangerous landslides. Uncertainty about the stability of the underlying geological structures as the reservoir fills up is raising fresh fears about the safety of new buildings on the hillsides. The reservoir and dam are so big, they could cause subterranean structures to shift.
Those who bought new homes at Fengjie - when it was rebuilt for the third time - are up in arms because the authorities in Chongqing are refusing to issue land ownership certificates.
"Surveyors came here and found that it has been built on ground that is geologically unstable," said Mr Hong. "A lot of people think corrupt officials are to blame."
Just how many will be relocated by the end of the 20-year project is a matter of some controversy, with the officials sticking to 1.2 million and some experts saying this too has been miscalculated, and that the true number will be around two million.
By then over a million people in the Chongqing municipality will have been forcibly resettled.