Reservoir construction has been one of the largest single causes of forced relocation in modern China. Early projects such as Sanmenxia on the Yellow River in the late 1950s moved several hundred thousand people from the Wei valley to Ningxia and elsewhere, many of whom returned to flooded or marginal land; official figures put cumulative reservoir resettlement from 1949 to the late 1990s at around 10 million. The Three Gorges Dam, approved in 1992 and completed in 2012, relocated an officially stated 1.13 million people, later reported as 1.4 million, from 13 cities, 140 towns and more than 1,350 villages, some to new towns on higher ground and some to distant provinces. Human Rights Watch documented in 1995 that residents who protested or petitioned over compensation were detained, and China's own National Audit Office later found large-scale diversion of resettlement funds. The government presents the programme as necessary flood control, power generation and poverty reduction with compensation and new housing; critics, including Chinese scientists and journalists, have pointed to inadequate land at resettlement sites, income loss and landslides around the reservoir. In 2007 officials announced that a further four million people might be moved from the reservoir region for ecological reasons.
The Chinese state relocated rural and urban populations from reservoir areas for hydropower, flood control and water transfer projects
Official Chinese statistics give 541.67 million for year-end 1949. Ministry of Water Resources figures put cumulative reservoir resettlement since 1949 at over 10 million people, of whom about 1.3 million were moved for the Three Gorges Dam alone between 1993 and 2012.
There was no significant direct death toll from the resettlement itself. The harm was loss of land, homes and livelihoods, and in some cases detention of those who protested; deaths associated with dam failures, notably the Banqiao collapse of 1975, are a separate matter not covered here.
Human Rights Watch documented the demolition of homes and the detention of residents who protested over compensation in the Three Gorges reservoir area.
China