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Introduction: Southwest China’s Hydropower Expansion and Why It Matters There and Beyond Read chapter Read first chapter

2021 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

4. Contestation Over Moral Economy: Distant Resettlement from the Three Gorges Area to the Pearl River Delta

Author : Bettina Gransow

Published in: The Political Economy of Hydropower in Southwest China and Beyond

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

In the early 2000s, resettlers from the Three Gorges Dam area were accompanied by leading cadres, state propaganda, and media coverage on their migration to South China. As people displaced for the national good, they saw themselves as deserving material and social recognition and entitled to enhance their own life opportunities as new but equal citizens of Guangdong. Based on 26 qualitative interviews conducted in 2012, this chapter analyses the challenges and long-term coping strategies of a group of resettlers displaced in 2001 to the Pearl River Delta. To better understand the agency of the main actors (town government, host village, resettlement villagers) and their different perceptions of the resettlement village over more than ten years, this analysis draws on E. P. Thompson’s concept of moral economy. It is argued that while in the beginning the town government showed compassion for the ‘deserving’ resettlement village, this attitude changed when the resettlers (and the host village) did not respond as the town government had expected.

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previous chapter Leaving the Three Gorges After Resettlement: Who Left, Why Did They Leave, and Where Did They Go?
next chapter Population Resettlement for Hydropower Development in the Lancang River Basin: An Evolving Policy Framework and Its Implications for Local People
Footnotes
1
Baicun is the pseudonym for the resettlement village which was our field site. This is the same pseudonym used by Cheng Yu in his earlier research (Cheng 2006). In the English publication by Cheng and He (2006), Baicun is translated as ‘White Village’.
 
2
The projects were embedded in a broader research programme entitled ‘Megacities – Megachallenges: Informal dynamics of global change’ and funded by the German Research Foundation.
 
3
The IRRM provides a framework for risk assessment in resettlement processes, particularly focusing on the risk of impoverishment, which has been recognised as the most widespread effect of involuntary resettlement.
 
4
Interestingly, when the concept of developmental resettlement was taking shape in China in the 1980s and 1990s, the World Bank, a pioneer in drafting involuntary resettlement policies (and which refused to help fund the Three Gorges Dam because of the project’s high risks), watered down its progressive definition of development-oriented resettlement provided in 1990 in the Operational Directive 4.30. Its 2001 version ended up allowing borrowers the option of merely restoring incomes, which in turn could result in impoverishing the majority of resettlers (Tan 2008).
 
5
But in fact, from 2000 to 2006, 9007 rural residents from the TGA area were displaced to Guangdong (Tan 2008).
 
6
Chen Village is not the real name of the village; as an administrative village (guanli cun), Chen Village consists of several natural villages (ziran cun).
 
7
Two types of rural settings were identified in the TGA: purely rural agrarian areas and mixed peri-urban agricultural zones. There were significant differences in production, income sources, and land-use types between these two zones. Nonetheless, people living in non-agrarian peri-urban zones of a city or town were compensated and resettled like other rural residents engaged in agricultural production (Tan and Wang 2003). The criterion was the rural household registration (nongcun hukou) of these families rather than their actual occupations, sources of income, or lifestyles.
 
8
Pseudonyms are used for interviewees.
 
9
In his classic 1903 sociological study, Georg Simmel (1998 [1903]: 121) characterised social relations in the city as “indifferent to everything that is individual”.
 
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Metadata
Title
Contestation Over Moral Economy: Distant Resettlement from the Three Gorges Area to the Pearl River Delta
Author
Bettina Gransow
Copyright Year
2021
Book
The Political Economy of Hydropower in Southwest China and Beyond

Print ISBN: 978-3-030-59360-5

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-030-59361-2

Copyright Year: 2021

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59361-2_4