The central government has vowed to make "good and considerate
arrangements" for the nearly 400,000 people giving up their
ancestral homes for a multibillion-dollar project to transfer water
from the water-rich south to the parched north.
Zhang Jiyao, director of the South-North Water Diversion Project
Construction Committee under the State Council, made the promise at
a meeting on land requisition and resident relocation held in
Beijing Tuesday morning.
On the same day, the central government issued a provisional
regulation on land requisition, compensation and resettlement for
the project. The regulation went into effect immediately.
Zhang said the project would involve more than 100 counties in
seven provinces and municipalities and require the relocation of
300,000 to 400,000 people.
It will be China's second largest resettlement scheme after the
Three Gorges Project, which entails the relocation of 1.1 million
people.
Zhang said resettlement should be given top priority for the
entire project.
"We must ensure that good arrangements are made for the lives
and work of the resettled people, and that the living standards of
those people will not go down because of resettlement," said
Zhang.
Zhang also vowed to keep the project clean of the embezzlement
and corruption scandals that have plagued the resettlement process
of the Three Gorges Project. In 2000, auditors discovered local
officials had used 470 million yuan (US$57 million) from the
relocation budget to build hotels, run companies, buy cars or pay
salaries.
The late Chairman Mao Zedong first conceived of the South-North
Water Diversion Project in 1952. After debates that lasted nearly
half a century, the State Council sanctioned the ambitious project
in December 2002.
By 2050, it will divert 44.8 billion cubic meters of water annually
from the Yangtze, China's longest river, through eastern, middle
and western routes to relieve water shortages in north China.
The project, with an estimated total cost of 500 billion yuan
(US$60.24 billion), has aroused global concern about land use,
regional environmental damage and impact on agriculture along the
planned routes.
Severe pollution in the waterways is another concern. Despite a
growing awareness of the dire costs to the environment of China's
industrial boom, heavy polluters continue to foul water and air
owing to poor enforcement of environmental laws and regulations at
the local level.
"Water quality on the eastern route, threatened by many chronic
sources of contamination, is among the top concerns of the
project," said one expert involved in the project.
The Ministry of Water Resources reported earlier this year that
less than half of the nation's surface water is potable as a result
of pollution, and 35 percent of its ground water has been rendered
undrinkable.
At a forum on March 31, Ma Jianhua, chief engineer of the
Yangtze River Water Resources Commission, warned that excessive
exploitation had already caused pathological changes along sections
of the river and that conditions are worsening.
The river is home to critically endangered wildlife, including
the Yangtze River Dolphin, or Baiji, the world's most endangered
cetacean and one of the 12 most endangered species in the
world.
About 24 billion tons of effluent is pumped into the Yangtze
annually. Lakes and wetlands along its length have receded owing to
rapid urbanization and the reclamation of marshlands, while
schistosomiasis, or snail fever, has reached epidemic proportions
in many areas.
Supporters, however, insist that the project is the only
solution to the worsening water crisis in the country, where per
capita fresh water possession is barely a quarter of the world
average.
Unlike other water resource management programs in China, they
say, the project balances the complicated interests of varied water
stakeholders and is committed to "finding harmony between different
interest groups as well as between nature and mankind."
Construction of the project's 1,150-kilometer eastern route
began in December 2002 and is expected to start supplying water to
Shandong
Province by 2007. Work on the 1,246-kilometer central route
started in December 2003 and should be sending water to Hebei,
Henan, Beijing and Tianjin by 2010. Construction of the western
route is scheduled to begin in 2010.
(Xinhua News Agency, China.org.cn April 6, 2005)
