Choking on Growth - Part V: Far From Beijing’s Reach, Officials Bend Energy Rules

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November 24, 2007

Far From Beijing’s Reach, Officials Bend Energy Rules

By HOWARD W. FRENCH

QINGTONGXIA, China — When the central government in Beijing announced an ambitious nationwide campaign to reduce energy consumption two years ago, officials in this western regional capital got right to work: not to comply, but to engineer creative schemes to evade the requirements.

The energy campaign required local officials to raise electricity prices as a way of discouraging the growth of large energy-consuming industries and forcing the least efficient of these users out of business. Instead, fearing the impact on the local economy, the regional government brokered a special deal for the Qingtongxia Aluminum Group, which accounts for 20 percent of this region’s industrial consumption and roughly 10 percent of its gross domestic product.

Local officials arranged for the company to be removed from the national electrical grid and supplied directly by the local company, exempting it from expensive fees, according to an electricity company official who asked not to be named, an official of the aluminum company and the official Web site of the nearby city of Shizuishan. As a result, Qingtongxia continued to get its power at the lowest price available.

It was a cat-and-mouse game grimly familiar to Chinese officials, who have a long tradition of spearheading ambitious nationwide campaigns that are all too often thwarted at the local level, partly because local priorities clash with national ones.

Concerned about China’s roaring economic engine consuming too much energy, national officials aimed to cut energy use by 20 percent per dollar of output within five years. China’s energy consumption has more than quadrupled since 1980.

The environmental toll is staggering. The country is already the world’s largest user of coal, the dirtiest type of energy. China’s coal consumption alone is projected to double in the next 20 years, according to the International Energy Agency.

Beijing has so fixated on the 20 percent goal that it has become the centerpiece of its overall strategy to reduce pollution in addition to consumption, as well as its main talking point in diplomatic negotiations to curb the output of gases that cause global warming. The target has elicited support among environmentalists in China and abroad. They regard it as ambitious given the explosion of heavy industry in China, which consumes vast amounts of electricity and, as it expands, makes the overall economy less energy efficient.

Drive to Conserve Sputters

Even so, the drive has mostly sputtered. According to official estimates, which in China are often overly generous, the country saved only 1.23 percent of energy per unit of output last year. In the first half of 2007, the authorities claim to have achieved 2.4 percent, double the previous year’s rate. Energy experts say they believe that the savings will increase over time, but to meet the goal of a 20 percent reduction by 2010, the country will have to reduce energy per unit of output by 4 percent a year on average, so the chances of achieving it look increasingly slim.

Officials in Beijing, faced with the likelihood that they will fall short of their target, have issued uncharacteristically scathing assessments of the performance of some local leaders, and they have vowed to use more of their powers to bring wayward officials into line. In May, China’s premier, Wen Jiabao, complained bitterly. “Understanding is not adequate, responsibilities are unclear, measures are not complementary, policies are incomplete, investment doesn’t arrive, and coordination is ineffective,” he said of efforts to cut energy consumption. “If these problems are not turned around, it will be difficult to achieve any obvious progress.”

More recently, Zhang Lijun, a deputy director of the State Environmental Protection Administration, warned that China was likely to miss its targets for emissions controls for the current five-year plan, which ends in 2010. “We haven’t spotted any substantial indicators of a slowdown in the expansion of energy-intensive sectors,” Mr. Zhang said.

The struggle to meet the target highlights the challenge of making China greener at a time when China’s top leaders have continued to emphasize breakneck growth, even as they worry about its costs. Officials at all levels arguably still face greater risks to their careers if they allow economic performance, job creation or tax revenue to lag than if they fail to curb pollution. Slower growth also means fewer opportunities for friends and relatives of people in power to cash in on the country’s boom.

The tug of war between localities and the central government also shows the limits of China’s ability to impose change on a vast, unruly country by edict, while exposing the weaknesses of a one-size-fits-all approach to reform in a country where regional economic disparities are rapidly growing.

In the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, the western region where Qingtongxia is, the drive to save energy ran up against the local obsession with economic growth. For years, the province was left out of the economic boom that transformed China’s coastal cities. In the late 1990s, China initiated a “Develop the West” campaign, encouraging regions like Ningxia to catch up with other areas. Now the state’s priorities are beginning to move away from unrestrained growth, just as Ningxia was beginning to move toward it.

Ningxia depends on its metallurgy industry to bring a prosperity that has long eluded its residents. It is one of the few advantages in this landlocked area. Coal is plentiful here, and planners were quick to seize on the idea of using it to generate the prodigious amounts of electricity needed to smelt metals. Now, the shift in policy directions from Beijing threatens that ambition.

“It’s such a simple theory to say that everyone knows you make more profit growing bananas than potatoes,” said an executive of one metal working factory who used a farming analogy to question the central government’s energy reforms. “But how can you force people to grow bananas on land where only potatoes will grow? Ningxia is a land of potatoes, and it is our natural resources and environment that determine everything.”

Conscious of Lagging Growth

Publicly, regional and company officials say they must heed the central government’s command. “If the policy was issued at the national level, then it must have been taken after careful consideration,” said Ding Jiangtao, deputy director of Qingtongxia’s aluminum smelter.

But in practice, local officials are acutely conscious of their lagging growth. Zhang Jianping, the deputy director of the Electricity Bureau of the Ningxia Economy Commission, which is in charge of carrying out the energy reforms, said: “As a less developed region, Ningxia needs time to progress and develop. We’re working hard to close the gap between us and the other provinces.”

In Ningxia, signs of this gap are everywhere. Even the regional capital, Yinchuan, has an unfinished look and feel to it, with broad ceremonial avenues, but little of the traffic and bustle common in the country’s east. The countryside is all arid farmland, occasionally relieved by low-slung mountains. Here and there, the government has created industrial zones, hoping to incite a takeoff. Most, however, consist of little more than grimy grids of streets where coal dust hangs thick in the air.

Even before the national energy consumption campaign began in 2005, Ningxia officials worked to get around environmental regulations that could hinder growth. Although Beijing issued rules in 2002 trying to limit the number of new coal-burning power plants, Ningxia has built at least three that either did not have the required permission, or failed to meet new environmental standards, according to the State Environmental Protection Administration.

Even after the national government canceled exemptions to special consumption fees that used to be available to companies like Qingtongxia in 2004, the local government extended them for another year, obtaining huge savings for its metal industries. As recently as 2005, regional officials continued to argue that the exemptions should remain.

Local officials have long permitted big companies like Qingtongxia to undercut even officially established energy prices. The lowest officially permitted electricity price in Ningxia, usually reserved for the most efficient of big industrial energy users, is 5.3 cents per kilowatt hour. But until this past May, Qingtongxia had managed to win itself a rate of 4.8 cents per kilowatt hour.

The central government tried to shame the provinces into complying. This April, Beijing cited 14 provinces it said had failed to comply with the new efficiency rules. Among them was the Ningxia region, whose energy intensity, or rate of power consumption per unit of gross domestic product, is the country’s highest. Beijing’s new guidelines called upon each of China’s provinces to draw up a list of its most wasteful industries and to put into effect a new pricing schedule for electric power that penalizes the least efficient users.

But Mr. Zhang, the deputy director of Ningxia’s electricity bureau, claimed he had never heard that Ningxia was cited for violations. Mr. Zhang also said he was unsure whether any list of big energy wasting industries had yet been drawn up. “We’ve actively improved our work and we need the media to understand us,” he said.

An official at the Ningxia Power Company who spoke on the condition of anonymity said many of the region’s strategic metal working industries had been spared Beijing’s mandated price rises until as recently as this May, nearly two years after they were announced. “That favorable price wasn’t approved by the state,” the official of one company said flatly. “It was a regional policy.”

Getting Around the Rules

Although it has protected its biggest energy users, the Ningxia government has begun to go after smaller industrial power consumers, imposing higher electricity prices and forcing some companies out of business. At the Lanshan industrial zone, a grid of old-line coal and metal working factories, managers of small and medium-size factories complained that they were being seriously hurt by higher electricity prices.

“There is no way for me to squeeze out any savings to offset the higher price of electricity,” said an official at the Shizuishan Tianhe Ferroalloy Company, where workers removed large vats of molten material from a giant furnace by hand. “The equipment we have determines the amount of electricity you consume each month, and our wages are already set. If I lower them, the workers won’t stay.”

The chairman of the company, Dai Zhanyin, said there was no use complaining. Unlike the situation at a big company like Qingtongxia, he said, “no one will care about your loss.”

Others among the relatively small players, however, have found the region’s new energy savings regulations easy to get around. At another metal working plant, where iron ore is forged into bread loaf-shaped lumps of steel, Di Duoxing, the chairman of Shizuishan City Hepu Mining Industrial Company, said the small size of his furnace had won him a place on the list of inefficient energy consumers and put him in line for sharply increased electricity prices.

Mr. Di struck on an idea, though. Using a single hand-operated press, his factory produces a small number of bricks from recycled materials recovered from his steel foundry. “When I went to pay the electricity bill I protested that I was a producer of recycled bricks, and they suspended the price increase,” Mr. Di said. “But as far as I know, the rest of the silicon-iron producers have already been subjected to the new price.”

Chinese environmentalists say to make such campaigns work, the government will have to penalize localities that fail to comply. “To get reforms implemented, two things have to be done,” said Lin Boqiang, director of the China Energy Research Institute at Xiamen University. “One is to rate the local government’s performance on compliance, and if they don’t comply telling people they have to go. The other is introducing financially meaningful penalties. We haven’t seen either of these yet.”

Li Zhen contributed reporting.

Choking on Growth - Part IV: Chinese Dam Projects Criticized for Their Human Costs

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November 19, 2007

Chinese Dam Projects Criticized for Their Human Costs

By JIM YARDLEY

JIANMIN VILLAGE, China — Last year, Chinese officials celebrated the completion of the Three Gorges Dam by releasing a list of 10 world records. As in: The Three Gorges is the world’s biggest dam, biggest power plant and biggest consumer of dirt, stone, concrete and steel. Ever. Even the project’s official tally of 1.13 million displaced people made the list as record No. 10.

Today, the Communist Party is hoping the dam does not become China’s biggest folly. In recent weeks, Chinese officials have admitted that the dam was spawning environmental problems like water pollution and landslides that could become severe. Equally startling, officials want to begin a new relocation program that would be bigger than the first.

The rising controversy makes it easy to overlook what could have been listed as world record No. 11: The Three Gorges Dam is the world’s biggest man-made producer of electricity from renewable energy. Hydropower, in fact, is the centerpiece of one of China’s most praised green initiatives, a plan to rapidly expand renewable energy by 2020.

The Three Gorges Dam, then, lies at the uncomfortable center of China’s energy conundrum: The nation’s roaring economy is addicted to dirty, coal-fired power plants that pollute the air and belch greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming. Dams are much cleaner producers of electricity, but they have displaced millions of people in China and carved a stark environmental legacy on the landscape.

“It’s really kind of a no-win situation,” said Jonathan Sinton, China program manager at the International Energy Agency. “There are no ideal choices.”

For now, China’s choice is to keep building big dams, even as the social and environmental impacts of the projects are increasingly questioned. The Three Gorges Dam is projected as an anchor in a string of hydropower “mega-bases” planned for the middle and upper reaches of the Yangtze River. By 2020, China wants to nearly triple its hydropower capacity, to 300 gigawatts.

The Communist Party leaders who broke ground on the Three Gorges project in 1994 had promised that China could build the world’s biggest dam, manage the world’s biggest human resettlement and also protect the environment. Critics warned of potential dangers, but saw those objections pushed aside. Now, critics say, the problems at the Three Gorges underscore the risks of the new phase of dam building, which could displace more than 300,000 people.

“In western China, the one-sided pursuit of economic benefits from hydropower has come at the expense of relocated people, the environment and the land and its cultural heritage,” Fan Xiao, a Sichuan Province geologist and a critic of the Three Gorges project, said via e-mail. “Hydropower development is disorderly and uncontrolled, and it has reached a crazy scale.”

Advocates say hydropower is one of China’s richest and least tapped energy resources. Even though much of the country is plagued with drought and water shortages, China also boasts a knot of important rivers that flow out of the Tibetan high plateau. Currently, China uses only about one-fourth of its hydropower potential.

A Hunger for Energy

At the same time, China’s insatiable appetite for energy is mostly being met with a building spree of coal-fired power plants. Coal accounts for 67 percent of China’s energy supply. Just last year, China added 102 gigawatts of generating capacity, as much as the entire capacity of France.

To ease its addiction to coal, China wants 15 percent of the country’s energy consumption to come from renewable sources by 2020, compared with 7.5 percent today. To do that, it is developing solar, wind and biomass projects so rapidly that some experts say it could soon become a world leader in renewable energy. Even so, forecasts show these sources will amount to less than 4 percent of the energy supply by 2020.

Nuclear power is another popular alternative, and officials plan to double its capacity by 2020. Yet even such a huge expansion will only amount to 4 percent of the energy supply.

Hydropower, by contrast, already accounts for 6 percent of the power supply and has major growth potential. Chen Deming, one of the government’s top economic planners, said hydropower was a critical noncarbon energy source and described the negative impacts of dams as “controllable.” He said officials would emphasize environmental protection and resettlement issues on future projects.

“We believe that large-scale hydropower plants contribute a lot to reduce energy consumption, air and environmental pollution,” Mr. Chen said at a September news conference. China, he added, planned to develop hydropower on “a considerable scale.”

Internationally, a debate has raged for years about large dams (those higher than 50 feet) because of their legacy of disruption. Many environmentalists contend that electricity generated by large dams should not be considered renewable because of the social and environmental damage that follow many projects. The United States has many large dams, but in recent years has started decommissioning some of them, particularly in the West, because of environmental concerns.

Tension about large dams is also rising in China. Environmentalists are pushing for tighter regulation and more public input before projects are approved. Resettlement remains a volatile issue. Two years ago, more than 100,000 people protested the Pubugou Dam project in Sichuan Province, until the riot police crushed the demonstration.

President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao appear less enamored of the big projects than their predecessors. Neither man attended last year’s ceremony for the completion of the Three Gorges Dam. Mr. Wen has demanded environmental reviews for different proposed sites. Yet with the momentum of the surging economy, most projects continue moving forward.

The renewed debate about the Three Gorges project offers a view of the competing pressures on China. Equal parts vanity project and technological marvel, the Three Gorges was initially conceived for flood control, not for any efforts to promote clean energy.

Today, dams are big business in China, and profit-seeking is another major reason behind the hydropower push.

Few if any hydropower projects have been more controversial than the Three Gorges. Entire cities were inundated along with ancient temples and other landmarks. Today, many of the people resettled by the project are still struggling to survive. For years, despite the problems, Chinese officials rarely criticized the project or expressed concern.

And then, unexpectedly, the silence broke.

‘Hidden Dangers’

At a forum on Sept. 25 in the city of Wuhan, a group of officials and experts gathered for a discussion about the Three Gorges Dam that would ripple across China and beyond. A keynote speaker at the forum was Wang Xiaofeng, a point person on the project for China’s State Council, the highest executive body in the government.

Mr. Wang began by reciting different accomplishments and reminding his audience that China had overcome widespread skepticism to prove it could build the project. But with the construction of the hydropower station entering its final phase, “environmental security” represented the new challenge, he said. According to a transcript of his speech, Mr. Wang warned that “hidden dangers,” if left untended, could breed disaster. He said that increased pressures on the shoreline “may become causes for water pollution, landslides and other geological disasters.”

Water quality in the main reservoir remained stable, but Mr. Wang said pollution was worsening in tributaries because of high levels of nitrates and phosphates that had already endangered drinking water in some areas. He said an algal bloom from too many nutrients earlier this year on a tributary had contaminated drinking water for 50,000 people in Fengdu County.

Mr. Wang framed his speech like a call to action. He said officials needed to address environmental problems “at the root.” He warned that government agencies were not prepared for emergencies and had no plan for natural disasters like an earthquake. He declared that China would now “work hard to build a first-class hydropower project and to create a first-class environment.”

“The environmental work of the Three Gorges Dam will be a long and hard road,” he cautioned.

Critics Are Astonished

The next day, Xinhua, the government’s news agency, carried a few comments from Mr. Wang and other regional officials in an article that ran beneath a blaring headline on the agency’s English-language Web site: “China Warns of Environmental ‘Catastrophe’ From Three Gorges Dam.”

Longtime critics of the project felt vindicated, if astonished, at the official concession. “In more than 20 years that have passed, the dam authority and official Chinese media have been reluctant to utter one word about problems with the big dam project,” Dai Qing, a prominent dam critic, wrote on the Web site of Probe International, an environmental group.

“Instead, they have tried to cover up, make false reports and deceive ordinary Chinese people,” she wrote.

In Beijing, some observers wondered if Mr. Hu and Mr. Wen had allowed the public airing in order to distance themselves from a project built by earlier leaders. Others speculated that officials in the reservoir region were publicizing the problems because the last construction phase ends in 2009. New problems could mean new streams of government financing.

Most of all, though, the mere suggestion of a “catastrophe” raised an alarming question: What constitutes a catastrophe at the world’s largest dam?

Mr. Fan, the geologist and critic, said the Three Gorges region had a history of geological fragility. He said the worst situation would be a major earthquake induced by pressure from the rising water — a possibility that officials have long discounted. Heavy silt accumulation, if seemingly less alarming, could also pose severe problems upstream as it gradually builds up the floor of the reservoir.

Silt accumulation has steadily reduced the capacity of other Chinese dams to store water, which has also reduced electrical generation. Planners of the Three Gorges Dam estimated that sedimentation could become a problem upstream in the city of Chongqing within 20 years.

But Mr. Fan and other scientists say sedimentation is already happening at a rate that could create flooding and shipping problems in Chongqing much sooner than expected.

Proponents of the dam have quickly defended the project on the Internet and in Chinese publications. Xinhua, the official news agency that helped fuel the debate, has since taken a more measured tone. Zhang Boting, an advocate for the hydropower industry, said environmental issues were initially exaggerated in the news media. He said national statistics showed that overall water quality was improving and contended that his own research found that the number of landslides had declined since dam construction began.

“There is no hard evidence to show there is dramatic change,” said Mr. Zhang, who is vice secretary general of the China Hydropower Engineering Society, an industry trade group. “We have problems, but we predicted those problems a long time ago. We are tackling those problems.”

Mr. Zhang said the situation was really about local bureaucracies facing the end of the project and looking for more financing. “Electricity is such a lucrative industry,” Mr. Zhang said. “The Three Gorges is like a piece of fat. Everybody wants to have a bite.”

Big Dams and Big Money

China once was so poor it struggled to build big projects. Today, dams are a huge business in China, and the giant utilities that build them are soaked with government and private investment money. When the corporation building the Three Gorges project publicly listed a subsidiary in 2003, share prices surged by 45 percent as the company raised nearly $1.2 billion in a single day.

In 2002, the country began to dismantle its inefficient electric power monopoly. Five power giants were created and encouraged to exploit energy resources at a time when China was encountering sporadic regional blackouts. Competitive pressures drove each utility to pursue as many energy projects as possible to secure market share.

Today, the Three Gorges Dam is the de facto anchor of a planned system of 12 hydropower mega-bases on the middle and upper reaches of the Yangtze. Over all, officials have said more than 100 hydropower stations could be built on the upper Yangtze basin within two decades. The government-owned corporation that built the Three Gorges Dam has already started construction on 3 of the 12 large projects.

One of those sites, Xiluodu, will be the country’s second-largest hydropower station when it is completed in 2015. Two years ago, regulators halted construction at Xiluodu because the project lacked a proper environmental impact study. But work has quietly resumed. In November, crews succeeded in damming the Jinsha River, the tributary that forms the upper reaches of the Yangtze.

Environmentalists worry that these systems create a domino effect in which one mega-dam begets another.

New laws require dam projects to undergo environmental impact studies and also provide opportunities for public comment and oversight. But those laws are easy to circumvent, or ignore. Xiluodu, for example, is being built in a national protection zone for several species of endangered fish.

“These large dams will have a lot of impacts, sometimes irreversible,” said Ma Jun, an environmentalist and the author of “China’s Water Crisis.” “We have to look at them very carefully and follow our legal requirements very strictly.”

Richard Taylor, executive director of the International Hydropower Association, predicted that the pace of construction would slow down as China began to pay more attention to strategic planning for social and environmental issues. “There are some key players in China who want to be part of that more progressive approach,” he said.

Dam opponents have scored a handful of victories. In 2004, Mr. Wen, the prime minister, unexpectedly suspended plans for 13 dams along the Nu River. The Nu passes through a Unesco World Heritage site and is one of the last free-flowing rivers in Asia. In Sichuan Province, a large dam that would have inundated a Qin Dynasty waterworks was canceled after opponents framed the project as an attack on China’s cultural heritage.

But opposition is still often steamrolled. The 100,000 protesters at Pubugou dam created a crisis that reached the desk of Mr. Wen. Ultimately, farmers saw little improvement in the compensation package. Last year, the authorities executed a leader of the protests for what they said was his role in the death of a policeman. Now the dam is moving forward.

And so are others. The Xiluodu Dam will force the relocation of more than 100,000 people in the city of Zhaotong. City officials are concerned. A report written by Chinese scientists and Zhaotong officials bluntly addressed the potential problems.

“Past experience has also taught that hydropower development will not necessarily improve local social and economic conditions,” the authors wrote. “There is widespread concern that, although the hydropower stations are as modern as those in Europe, the residents will become as poor as people in Africa.”

For the past decade, the only two directions for people in the Three Gorges region have been up or out. Large, white markers etched with the number “175” are placed on many hillsides. No other explanation is needed; everything below has already been inundated or will be when the reservoir reaches 175 meters, or about 574 feet, in 2009.

The Displaced

In his 2007 work report to the National People’s Congress, Prime Minister Wen noted that dam building, over many years, has displaced 23 million people in China. The Three Gorges was supposed to be a model program that would not just move people but also rebuild communities.

Resettlement began in 1997 as an upward migration. Farmers could relocate to newly built cities or stay on the farm, albeit on higher ground. But studies now show the region’s population density is almost twice the national average. In many villages, too many farmers are perched on steep slopes, sharing too little land.

The upward migration also damaged the environment. Farmers cleared land to plant crops or rows of orange trees. Deforestation contributed to soil erosion and destabilized many hillsides. Today, construction crews are busy reinforcing crumbling hillsides above the reservoir with concrete. In the mountains, soil erosion is endemic. In the village of Pinggao, Li Shuyi, 50, walked down the sloped fields, pointing out cracks in the earth.

“Whenever it rains, the soil starts flooding downhill,” Mr. Li said. “The problem is getting more and more serious in recent years.”

This summer, a tremor shook Pinggao like jelly, leaving cracks in several farmhouses. When rainfall is heavy, Mr. Li said his house swayed so much “you can hear the tiles cracking on the roof.”

He said, “Villagers are getting very worried.”

Problems have been evident for several years. As far back as 2000, the central government had already started changing national policies to address environmental decay. The clue had been the horrific floods along the Yangtze, which claimed thousands of lives in 1998. Deforestation and soil erosion along the upper reaches of the Yangtze had abetted the disaster; silted riverbeds became elevated highways for the raging currents.

Beijing ordered a national ban on timber cutting and began reforesting millions of acres along the Yangtze, including in the Three Gorges region. Many farmers who had moved uphill now were told to plant a stabilizing green belt along the shoreline. To further ease pressure on the land, Three Gorges officials changed the relocation policy, promising free land and financial help for people who moved to other provinces.

Thousands Return

But leaving the region was not a good solution for many farmers — or a permanent one. More than 100,000 people left, but thousands have since returned, despite no longer holding local residency permits. In 2002, a group of 57 villagers left the village of Daqiao above the Yangtze for a village in Jiangxi Province. Today, all 57 have returned.

“We tried to grow rice in Jiangxi,” said Lin Shengping, 51, whose adult children had stayed in Daqiao. “The harvest was really small. So we all came back. We don’t have money, either in Jiangxi or here. But at home, I can take care of my grandchildren so my son and daughter-in-law can go out to work.”

Now, though, officials want people to move again. On Oct. 12, the Xinhua news agency confirmed that a new resettlement plan had been approved: At least four million people in Chongqing Municipality would have to be moved by 2020, including at least two million living in the reservoir region.

Chongqing officials quickly tried to deflect any suggestion that the plan represented another dam resettlement. Instead, they said, it represented a national experiment approved by Beijing in June. Chongqing would become a “pilot reform city.” Just as Beijing used “special economic zones” like Shenzhen to kick-start the country’s economic reforms during the 1980s, Chongqing would become a laboratory for trying to eliminate the urban-rural income gap.

“We’re talking about separate issues,” said Lang Cheng, director of Chongqing’s Immigration Bureau, which helped oversee the dam resettlement plan. “One is the Three Gorges relocation. One is the city plan for Chongqing for the future.”

For Chongqing officials, the emphasis was on urbanization. Rural residents would have the choice to move to the outskirts of the city. Officials said the plan would offer enticements not available to migrants in the more prosperous coast, like residency permits enabling new arrivals to qualify for social welfare benefits.

But officials also said they hoped the plan would provide relief for the degraded land around the reservoir. “These relocated people sacrificed a lot for the Three Gorges Dam and their living standard dropped,” said Xu Yuming, a researcher involved in planning the program. “Now we are facing a new challenge of how to improve their living standards. The quality of land is getting worse and worse the higher they go. And there are now more people than the land can sustain.”

In the isolated mountain villages above the reservoir, farmers have heard nothing about a new resettlement plan. For many farmers, the immediate concern is the land beneath their feet. Landslides are striking different hillsides as the rising water places more pressure on the shoreline, local officials say. In Fengjie County, officials have designated more than 800 disaster-prone areas. Since 2004, landslides have forced the relocation of more than 13,000 people in the county. Not too far from the dam itself, residents in the tiny village of Miaohe felt a major tremor in April beneath their farmhouses. Officials ordered them to relocate for three months into a mountain tunnel for lack of any other nighttime shelter. “It rained the whole month,” said Han Yun, 43, a woman working in the fields. “It leaked the whole time. During the night, while we were sleeping, trucks were passing through the other side of the tunnel. Every part of my bones was aching.”

Not Enough to Rebuild

Residents now are supposed to relocate to a new village site less than a mile away. But many people did not get enough compensation to pay for new housing. “We have three family members,” Ms. Han said. “We only have 10,000 yuan (about $1,300). With such a small amount of money, I can’t even build a first floor.”

Farther upstream, people in Jianmin Village are in the same predicament.

Around daybreak on June 22, Lu Youbing awoke to the screams of her brother-in-law and the sickening sensation of the earth collapsing. Her mountain farmhouse in Jianmin Village buckled as a landslide swept it downhill. In all, 20 homes were demolished. Five months later, Ms. Lu is living in a tent, fending off rats and wondering where her family can go.

“We have nothing left,” she said. “Not a single thing.”

Winter is approaching, and she is trying to block out cold air — and rats — by pinning down the tent flaps with rocks. Villagers have been told that more landslides are possible. Ms. Lu lives with her second husband and their two children. They are too poor to buy an apartment in the city or to build a new home on higher ground. Local officials gave them the tent. Villagers have donated clothes.

The tents are pitched on the only available flat land — a terrace with a monument celebrating efforts by local officials to improve the environment.

“We don’t know about winter,” she said. “This is the only option we have. What else can we do?”

Zhang Jing contributed research.