Word: dammed
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...China's last free-flowing rivers unveiled a memorial to a fallen comrade, an activist who had died of a heart attack in January. But their mission had another motive. Following the ceremony, they traveled into remote regions of Yunnan province to gauge opposition to a spate of new dam projects and offer assistance to vulnerable peasants trying to stop them from being built. This wasn't a secret trip. Plainclothes police videotaped everything. Undeterred, the outsiders met with peasants in the prosperous village of Chezhou and found many unwilling to sacrifice their homes to the waters behind a proposed...
...Communist Party's power but instead focus on issues like AIDS education, legal reform and, above all, environmental protection--endeavors the government professes to support. What unifies the new generation is a commitment to individual rights. The cover of the influential Beijing magazine Economics last year called the anti-dam movement a "New Social Power in China." "They're promoting the rights of ordinary people," says Elizabeth Economy of the New York--based Council on Foreign Relations, author of The River Runs Black, about China's environment. "Although it's dangerous for them to say so, that means political reform...
...mere presence of environmentalists marks a sea change. When Beijing approved the massive Three Gorges Dam in 1992, public opposition was nearly impossible. The $24 billion hydropower station at the center of the project, now under construction, will turn the middle of the Yangtze into a lake half the length of California and force 1.5 million people to relocate. Since the dam was conceived as a monument to Communist Party power, opponents were branded as dissidents. Reforms have changed that. "The government sees activist groups as less of a threat now," says Fu Tao, of the Chinese Academy of Social...
...Xiaogang, 53, the founder of Green Watershed, realized that the millions of villagers affected by China's 80,000 dams are a powerful weapon. Tens of thousands facing relocation in Sichuan province rioted last October over compensation for their paddy lands along the Dadu River. They formed a "dare-to-die brigade" that held a local official hostage until Beijing dispatched paramilitary police to the area. At least two smaller demonstrations followed in neighboring provinces. Since the media are barred from reporting on trouble at dam sites, peasants remain ignorant of resettlement problems elsewhere. "If people know what's happened...
Last summer Yu chartered a bus and drove peasants from a proposed dam area along the upper Salween to visit a 10-year-old dam a few hours away. The government had celebrated the Manwan Dam as a model of development for its cheap electricity and successful relocation of 3,500 people. The visitors saw something different: peasant women picking through the hydropower station's garbage dump for plastic bottles to recycle for pennies. Sobbing, the women explained that they had not found jobs after losing their land. The scene was captured in an underground documentary that environmentalists have passed...