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Jasper Becker

AT THE STROKE of a pen, Premier Zhu Rongji ordered the removal of more than 2.5 million people from the Yangtze flood plain after the terrifying 1998 floods.

Four years later most of them have gone, rebuilding their homes and sometimes demolishing and reconstructing entire small towns.

On Qinshan Island in Dongting Lake, the Zhang family and their neighbours were left until Stage 4 of the plan.

Last week they were busy pulling the tiles off their roof and loading their belongings on to a tractor to take them to their new house in the local town. The tiles and even the bricks will be used again.

When the next flood breaches the six-metre dyke nearby, what's left of the house will be submerged under water. Their fields will once again be part of the lake, part of a 560-square-km area of land reclaimed from the lake now being returned to its original state.

'The Government is very good. It helps the people,' said 73-year-old grandfather Zhang Yunzhang repeatedly as he accepted a cigarette from the local official in charge of handing out a government subsidy once the household moves.

The relocation of the Zhangs and their neighbours is taking place with little of the criticism by human rights groups looking at the far more contentious plans to find room for the 1.5 million forced to make way for the Three Gorges Dam. For all the social changes in recent years, the power of the state to move huge numbers of people at will remains astonishing.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the Government relocated about 170 million people by emptying the big cities, sending the Red Guards to the countryside and building the third-line military industrial complex in the interior.

These days many worry about the 120 million migrant workers who are said to be 'blindly' moving around the country in search of work. In fact, most of these are still moved under the orders of the authorities or state construction firms.

Tens of millions of urban dwellers are being moved out of the centre of big cities as they are rebuilt. At the same time, millions of peasants are temporarily allowed to move into these urban centres to do all the heavy labouring and construction work.

Much of the internal movement of people taking place in China is taking place largely out of sight. The vast majority of those moving house are just going a few kilometres from a village to their local township - which used to be better known as commune headquarters. This is how most of the 2.5 million from flood plains along the Yangtze are being relocated.

They are scattered across four provinces - Hunan, Jiangxi, Anhui and Hubei - and were living on reclaimed land created by building thousands of dams and dykes.

Reclamation started thousands of years ago, but under Mao it was vastly accelerated in a massive drive to increase the land devoted to growing grain and cotton - and to meet state targets. The Qinshan reclamation site, for instance, was built in 1958 during the Great Leap Forward by heavy manual labour and has since been repaired many times.

While this created more cropland, the wetlands and lakes steadily shrank. When the summer floods came, the waters had nowhere to go and the dykes had to be built higher and higher, so the cost of maintaining these fields escalated. The lakes and waterways silted up and the floods became increasingly dangerous.

One of the regions most at risk is the Jiangnan plain around Dongting Lake between Hunan and Hubei provinces. Dongting Lake shrank so dramatically that its capacity fell over 25 years from 14.7 billion cubic metres to 0.5 billion cubic metres. Another is Boyang Lake, further east, between Jiangxi and Anhui provinces.

The turning point came with the great floods of 1998 that killed at least 4,000 people. Premier Zhu deemed the floods a national emergency, called out the army and came close to blowing up the Yangtze dykes to protect big cities such as Wuhan.

From what people around Dongting Lake say, the 1998 floods may have been no worse than earlier ones but Mr Zhu seized on the opportunity to effect a grand policy reversal, perhaps the most dramatic of his tenure. He ordered vast areas of lake and wetlands to be restored, something unprecedented in Chinese communist history.

It is comparable to decisions taken in France and the United States in recent years to blow up one or two river dams. These were blocking valuable fish runs but are paltry affairs compared with what is being undertaken in China, although they have had a great symbolic value by overturning an orthodoxy of ever more dams and dykes.

Americans have pioneered the idea of moving residents out of flood plains, with the restoration of wetlands along the Mississippi. Even so, only China has ever attempted something quite so huge.

'It was done at once with no preparation or planning,' observes Liang Haitang, an energetic geographer from Nanjing who is working for the World Wildlife Fund. The WWF is funding several projects related to Dongting Lake and hopes to influence the way the scheme will function.

Typical for China is the way such a grand scheme was undertaken without consulting experts or the affected population.

Indeed, Ms Liang and fellow expert Zhang Chen are still not quite sure how the decision was taken, despite being involved in the project for three years.

Yet they say it is working well. Many people are willing to move to higher ground or to the local township. Several new townships have been built on Qinshan Island and the local economy has benefited from the input of government funds.

Ms Liang is happy with what has been done and excitedly points to wild birds flying overhead. 'See those wild ducks, they are from Siberia,' she says.

The great wetlands and lakes of the Yangtze are a vital link in the north-south great Asian migration routes for swans, herons, storks, duck, geese, cormorants and, above all, the precious and endangered four species of crane.

Even as Dongting Lake now provides a new and bigger sanctuary, she worries that the plan has not solved the question of how man and animal can co-exist and prosper in this densely populated land.

'Now the central Government recognises the value of the wetlands, we have to ensure people involved in the restoration can earn a living,' she says.

At Xipanshanzhou, where the dyke has been breached to flood what were recently paddy fields, Ms Liang shows visitors a big blackboard she uses in the local village. The WWF runs a pilot project to show the villages how year by year they can earn more money by raising ducks, breeding pigs or farming fish than by growing rice.

'It can be difficult to change their ideas,' she admits. So far the farmers-turned-fishermen are not competing with the wild birds for the same fish and for the moment all seems to be well on this part of the waterland.

Jasper Becker is the Post's Beijing bureau chief

jasper@a-1.net.cn



Restoring China's lost lakes