Chongqing (AsiaNews/Agencies) – The forced evacuation of over 4 million people from the area around the Three Gorges dam “is essential in order to safeguard the local ecology, which is worsening day by day”. The municipal authorities of Chongqing, the vast city in central China, to justify the recent ordered evacuation.
The residents will move from the "wings" - two areas in the northeast and southeast of Chongqing along the Yangtze - into the municipality's central "circle", an area within an hour of the city centre. The whole relocation - involving four times more than the last move - will take place over the next 10 to 15 years, with two million residents being moved in the next five years.
Chongqing deputy mayor Yu Yuanmu yesterday said: “On one hand, the Three Gorges Reservoir area's ecological environment is very fragile; its natural conditions are unsuitable for massive urbanisation and dense inhabitation. On the other hand, the area is already overpopulated, with a poor foundation for industrial development and serious social problems”.
The State Council announcement was widely seen as a government retraction from the positions of former president Jiang Zemin, who pushed the project through in the early 1990s despite widespread controversy. Although the dam will tame seasonal floods along the Yangtze River and help resolve a national energy shortage, it has been criticised for its US.5 billion price tag, displacement of 1.2 million residents, flooding numerous cultural relics and causing damage to an already weak environment along the river.
The government will provide economic incentives for all of those who choose to move voluntarily, and described its plan as an “improvement in the life of residents”. Environmentalist Wu Dengming, president of the Green Volunteer League of Chongqing, is less optimistic: “Problems caused by the first batch of a million immigrants still have not been resolved. Four million is no small matter”.