[华尔街日报]
在质疑中三峡工程继续进行
Demolition crews last week blew up the last buildings of 1,800-year-old Kaixian, the final county seat to be flooded by the Three Gorges Dam, amid a new round of concerns about migration and fears about possible forced relocations of people who have already been moved.
The homes of nearly 1.4 million people have been flooded under the 400-mile reservoir created by the construction of the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River. The dam was completed in 2006, and the reservoir is being filled up in stages before it reaches the final height of 175 meters by 2009.
Most of the migrants from the Three Gorges Dam were resettled on higher ground within a new municipality created when the city of Chongqing was elevated to provincial status in Sichuan province in western China.
But the migration caused by the dam project has exacerbated problems of overpopulation and poverty along the reservoir, now that hundreds of acres of farmland have been inundated. Chongqing researchers have calculated that some 2.3 million people still need to be moved from the banks of the reservoir to ease worsening water pollution and avoid the risk of landslides -- including some residents who have moved once already.
The government now says it wants to encourage those residents to leave the countryside surrounding the Three Gorges Reservoir and to move millions more from the poor mountainous regions farther inland as part of Chongqing's urbanization drive.
On Thursday, a Chongqing spokesman denied that millions would be forcibly relocated. 'The reports that another four million people will be moved out of the Three Gorges Reservoir area are not accurate,' city spokesman Wen Tianping said at a regular media briefing. 'The municipality aims to attract three to four million people from rural to urban areas by 2020 to narrow the urban-rural wealth gap,' he said, according to state media reports.
The Three Gorges dam, the world's largest, was built to control devastating floods on China's longest river and to generate clean energy. China's leaders have sought to tame the violent Yangtze for nearly a century. Construction began in 1994, but only after years of delays because of debate over the merits of the project.
Critics feared that the massive project would create a string of ecological, environmental and social problems. Criticism was mostly suppressed until recently, when the government made an unprecedented admission that the project has led to a series of problems, including increased landslides, worsening pollution and high unemployment among those dislocated by the dam. Migrants also have complained that widespread corruption has diverted state money meant for them to local government coffers.