March, 2010

Who Moved Chen Xiao Qing’s Water？
A Journey Into Water Equity at the Headwaters of the Water We Drink

Tai Sau Wai
Environmental Educator and Artist
currently partnering with Globalization Monitor

Stephen Chow’s Kungfu Hustle has a scene about a guy washed in shampoo screaming “Hey upper floors, turn your taps off”. The guy’s effort is futile. The director is making a parody out of the time when Hong Kong was at the mercy of its local precipitation. The text of the scene is about the guy’s personal hygiene at stake. More importantly, it has also revealed the politics behind our water supply – those living on the ground floor are contingent upon the better off upper floors and the landlord. In other words, financial and administrative power embedded in the building. Stephen Chow often takes the stand of the poor; however, he also trivializes their situations, and would not allow serious social matters that might kill a good laugh. The scene described is about a young single guy in a lesser matter. It would not be switched to a woman cooling a baby’s fever, for that would become no laughing matter. After all, to the director, serious dialogue is not his intent since Hong Kong has shaken off its dependency on tiny streams and local rainfall along with the said power dynamic. But has it, really? Or the place has just externalized the power play to Dong Jiang (東江) or the East River which is supplying us water?

Last September, I visited with my work partners some villages around the upper course of the river. One village near Longchuan (龍川) county displayed the disturbing water dynamics described above blatantly. There was an exuberant village official eagerly showing to my team the hillside reservoirs or shantang (山塘)  his village built for damming up small streams/runoffs. He also showed us the concrete water distribution system or sanmian guang (三面光) that could minimize water loss. The place was doing not badly evident by their large silos and good buildings. No wonder this guy was happy. He was not modest about his connections to the powerful people and his ability to raise money for these facilities. His village was located on the upper part of a very gentle gradient; there was another village below. On answering the question, “What about the lower village?”, the happy official said with a dismissing smile: “They had no means to build such facilities. I caught them red-handed a few times while lifting the gates of the reservoirs to steal our water. I let them go.”

To this village official, water is not a member of the commons, but private property of his village, which lent him the “self-proclaimed power” to arrest/release. He also told us that they were experiencing a very dry year, but would not be affected with blessings of the reservoirs. Glancing across the water-needy paddy fields and the dry blue sky, I could feel the heart-burns of the lower village. It was the time when the availability of water was crucial for the ripening of the rice. The harvest would be savaged if dryness proceeded. The lower village sadly demonstrated the vicious cycle between water poverty and economic poverty in rural areas.

State Power, Money Order and Water Order
Given that the water of Dong Jiang is now serving the affluent Hong Kong and other coastal cities downstream, instead of having access to the water of Dong Jiang, many villages are relying on hillside reservoirs for irrigation and even for their daily-uses. Hong Kong is propagating the old-water-order described earlier even when we are located at the originally disadvantaged lower course. Hong Kong now holds the rights to the upper course water of the river. The capital power of these (affluent) cities incorporated with the administrative to take possession of what should be members of a common.

The mega-reservoir Xingfeng Reservoir (新豐水庫) aka Wanlu Lake (萬綠湖),1 which collects and safe keeps Hong Kong's is located at Heyuan (河源). To guarantee the water supply, Heyuan government did not stop just at restricting water use of its people and industry, but went all the way to ensure that rain would be falling and streams would continue to flow, by protecting all its forests except those designated as commercial crops. Villagers could only collect firewood after a forest fire. Permission has to be applied for other uses. Some families located right next to a water preservation forest (保水林) receive 100 RMB as compensation from the government. However, with everything said and done, human efforts are of no match to temperamental weather patterns.

Photo 1		Photo 2

The boatman who took us around the mega-reservoir pointed out that the water level had dropped as much as 20 meters. The bright earth-red rim revealed by the receding water level enhanced the lake’s beautiful shades of green. The once submerged hilltops of the drowned valley decorated the lake as islets.

Guangdong lost its last hope for rainfall when the last typhoon of the season ducked the province. Precipitation fell as much as 30–50% when they were way into the dry season; 25% of the harvest would be devastated.2 The tributary area Dong Jiang had no exemption.

In late October our team visited the area again. This time we stopped at a couple of villages including reservoir resettlement areas right next to Dong Jiang’s headwaters. More red earth and islets were showing at Wanlu Lake.

Drought in a Left-Behind Village
Our team took 2 hours to ferry across the lake and hired a motor-cycle converted pick-up to take us to a remote village. The hilltop villagers there did not have to leave their ancestral land as they are above the submergence line. For a long time, they were isolated from the rest of the population as the water level rose - not only geographically, but also socially and economically. The new road connecting them to a nearby city completed only in 2008. It is still a good 4-hour drive.

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We found two women harvesting in the paddy fields. They showed us the drought damaged grains that looked sad and lifeless. A man was helping with the harvest too. He came to gather the stalks for his precious cattle. The drought had taken his pasture. He had already sold his pigs and piglets at loss. The fish ponds had no capacity to process the directly dumped pig excreta anymore and had become toxic without the needed replenishment water.

Xinfeng Reservoir in close proximity was no help to him. The water does not mean to be theirs. The man determined to press on next year and swore to find money to build for himself a hillside reservoir. However, it is doubtful whether his effort would be paid off. His farm in its first year of operation might soon be found out. The provincial government had been cracking down on hog farms along the river. High polluting activities are not allowed lest they would contaminate the top-class drinking water. Fish ponds as excreta processing device cannot match the environmental standards. They cannot handle the full spectrum of bio-pollutants, especially when the excrements are directly dumped without prior fermentation. Lucrative animal raising operations could lift farming communities out of poverty. Only to the villages along the river, it is a dream too far. Most of the farmers could not afford the equipments required.

Population Reduction and Resettlement Blue
Dam building around the world in populous places always means mass displacement of people and thinning of the original dam-sided population. We visited a resettlement village to see the effects on the local people. Life was hard when the village first moved here to share the land with original villagers. There was not enough farmland for going around until the government consolidated the people into row houses to release more land for the village. The row houses – now the villagers’ permanent homes – looked cramped and unfinished. Many of them were leaking. A grandma who invited us for tea grieved that the house was smaller than what was promised. Quite unlike a traditional farmer’s house, the row houses did not have space for subsistence farming and other farming chores. She was lucky that she was at the end of the row, so she occupied the public space for firewood store. Despite all that, each family owed the government 18,000 RMB for their unit when it was built.

The people in this settlement village did try to resist their bondage to poverty. Many of them tried by leasing their land for 180 RMB/mu/year to a developer who promised to turn their village into an ecological resort, as well as returning shares and employment. However, after the stream was dammed and their land drowned, the project was suspended. This means that many were left without an income. The rental income went directly to the local government as debt installment. A number of them insisted that they had only rented out their land but not water and thus had right to the fish. They crashed a few times with the developer’s security people when trying to fish out of the dammed water. Their fights were futile. For those who still have their land or have rented farm land, they could not direct this water to save their crops: Two-thirds of their paddy rice was lost to the drought that year.

The village used to be famous for its luffas, but the farmers were not growing consumer-based vegetables anymore. An auntie we ran into told us bluntly, “Who am I going to sell these vegetables to? There are not enough people around and there is no one coming to pick up our vegetables.” The village had lost over half of its original population through the resettlement process. Without a supporting population, no businesses can be viable. Cost conscious vegetable wholesalers will only come for a sizable batch. When asked whether she preferred her days before and after her settlement. She shot back plainly, “Of course the days before. We could at least support ourselves with side businesses then.”

The aunt also complained that after moving to the row houses, she has to walk half an hour to her old farm house where her pigs and fields are. This is tiring and time consuming for her not to mention the challenge this task holds to many elderly on their own in the village.

The Growing City-Village Disparity
Despite China’s strong and sustained economic growth, poverty is still persistent, especially in rural areas. Income inequalities between rural and urban residents have widened considerably since the late 1970s. Urban incomes are now more than three times higher than rural incomes.3 Guangzhou's GDP is 22 times of Heyuan's in 2008.4 This disparity has drawn all the young and able from this village to cities for a waged income. The old and the very young were left behind. This is further reducing the population of the village and their ability to be a self sustaining community. The situation has also detrimental effects on the left-behind children (留守兒童). We tried chatting up two of them under the care of their very old grandma. The two children played with us enthusiastically, but uttered only few words. There is a high chance that these children were developmentally lagging because of stimuli deprivation. We found no older children as they were away from the village. Many village-based schools were closed due to a lack of students. Many clinics were closed too.

The city-village disparity made leaving the village a welcomed idea especially to the young and able men. “Why don’t you resettle in the city?” I asked one of the men as my team was watching women filling up their pails with water at the community tap. He answered, “I could not come up with the 6,000 RMB to qualify for the lucky draw for an resettlement opportunity in the city.” “It was totally unfair. All of us should be going. The village official sold some of our spots so we had to draw.” I am still confused about the new re-settlement selection process for reducing the rural population: some told me that it was a complex 10-point system checking on whether a family could pay 1,000–4,000 RMB upfront, a family size over 4 with at least two able bodies. Now this man said it was a lucky draw for those who could pay 6,000 RMB. Whatever it was, what happened verified the drastic inequality within the village and contributed to the huge village-city income gap.

People with limited resources are often contingent upon those holding power. The financial crisis sent two young ladies from Shenzhen back to their grandma’s house. We ran later into two others when we were chatting up people by the communal tap. Then two more unemployed people showed up. They were men this time. The difference was, these men quitted, saying that the factories at the Pearl Delta were paying as low as 600–700 RMB, excluding meals and beds. To them such jobs simply are not economically viable.

As we were chatting, there was a commotion at the entrance. Two men were fighting. The drama finished with one man lying on the floor throwing tantrum. One person told us that such fights were common these days, for many men had difficulty handling their idleness. He mournfully said, “We (men) ain’t no farmers ain’t no workers.” He was angry that the local officials were deducting 20 RMB per month as public works reserve from the 50 RMB settlement compensation they have started to receive a few years ago. He was infuriated that the village official took the money but delivered no appropriate water works which consequentially costed them 18,000 RMB for drilling a deep well. The stagnant water in their only hillside reservoir stung.

More Studies are Called for to Understanding Gender Differences
While men could throw tantrums, women would not have such opportunities. Many factories preferred ruly women to men for a job that could be handled by both. If women were laid off, they would be back to their traditional caregiver roles. Their hardwiring with their families might lead some of them into locations which would cost them heavily.

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In the rural areas of Heyuan, the government has a heavy hand over the agro and forestry industries. In the city, high polluting industries are not permitted, unless the factories are fitted out for the stringent environmental standards. That means Heyuan cannot compete with other places without such restrictions for investments. To break the poverty spell, the city packaged the reservoir into a luring lake. Hotels and hostels have achieved an overwhelming presence in the city along side with services and entertainment venues. This development has strong implication towards the kinds of jobs available to the local women. Displacement often thrusts women into vulnerable positions by disconnecting them from land, resources and communities. Women’s health also tends to deteriorate after the displacement, as they are left behind to work on unfamiliar and even unproductive land.5 Studies on dams and droughts overseas revealed the risks of women being trafficked6 and exploitation by the sex industries.7 These reports are pointing to that more studies are required to understand the situation of women in Heyuan area. In this trip, we were only starting to skim through the surface on the experience of women. We look forward to opportunities to look into the gender perspective of water related displacement in this area.