The pilot phase of a grand resettlement project affecting more than 1.2 million people living along the Yellow River has begun in Henan Province, but the scheme’s necessity is being called into question by a few outlying researchers.
“Our village is one of the poorest in Henan due to its proximity to the Yellow River, with each farmer allocated a mere 100 square meters of land,” Chen told our reporter. “Almost all the villagers have agreed to the government-initiated relocation project.”Chen Cunli, a farmer in his fifties in Xingmiao Village, Henan Province, spoke animatedly withNewsChina when asked about an ongoing pilot resettlement project which will relocate his village. Xingmiao, with some 1,000 inhabitants, is located on the banks of the lower section of the Yellow River, historically notorious for its frequent floods, unpredictable course changes and rising bed due to silt sedimentation.
According to the official schedule, the project, once completed in early 2016, will provide Xingmiao’s displaced villagers with new apartments located in buildings in the county’s town center, some 10 kilometers away.
Bridges were torn down in the lower reaches of the Yellow River to allow discharged water and silt runoff from the Xiaolangdi Reservoir to drain downstream, July 4, 2015
Resettled residents look out over the site of their former homes, flooded during the construction of the Xiaolangdi Reservoir, June 9, 2007
In January 2014, the Henan provincial government formally announced its plan for the resettlement of over 1.25 million people living on the Yellow River floodplain, a displacement on a scale almost equal to that which occurred during the building of the Three Gorges Dam, which saw 1.3 million people relocated. Since early 2015, Henan Province launched the project’s initial pilot phase in 14 villages, affecting some 10,000 local residents living along various stretches of the Yellow River.
The main purpose of the project, according to officials, is to ensure public safety, reduce the impact of natural disasters during the flood season, promote healthy development of the shipping industry and help lift local residents out of poverty.
Unnecessary
“The resettlement project will cost an enormous amount, over 100 billion yuan (US$15.68bn),” said Qi Pu, a retired senior engineer with the Yellow River Conservancy Commission (YRCC) under the Ministry of Water Resources, in a recent interview withNewsChina. “[This is] a huge waste of national resources, since the current situation on the Yellow River, after decades of human interference, has changed dramatically.”
The Yellow River is famous – indeed, named for – the vast quantities of silt created by the flow of a disproportionately “insufficient” volume of water. A commonly acknowledged figure for silt deposits washed down the Yellow River annually is 1.6 billion tons (a figure confirmed in the 1950s and 1960s). In sharp contrast, the Yangtze River, China’s other major waterway, only produces around 600 million tons of silt annually. At the same time, it enjoys an average annual delta runoff of 960 billion cubic meters, almost 17 times the volume of water that is disgorged into the Pacific by the Yellow River (50 billion cubic meters).
According to Qi Pu, official data released by the YRCC have indicated that both the average annual runoff volume and production of silt in the Yellow River have been falling dramatically from the mid-1980s onwards. NewsChina obtained a 2014 YRCC report on water and silt levels that measured silt deposits in the hydrological monitoring station at Tongguan, Shaanxi Province. Engineering data showed that the average annual volume of silt in the river fell from 1.59 billion tons over the period 1919 to 1959, to 1.2 billion tons between 1960 and 1986, then to 807 million tons from 1987 to 1999, with only an average of 276 million tons deposited from 2000 to 2012. The average annual volume of water discharged into the ocean also fell from 42.6 billion cubic meters to 40.3 billion, 26 billion and finally 23 billion over the same periods of time. Indeed, water levels in the Yellow River have hit record lows in recent years due to drought and the central government’s immense South-North water diversion scheme (See: “River of Constant Sorrow,” NewsChina, November, 2013, Vol. 063).
In the November 2013 edition of Hohai University’s bimonthly periodical Advances in Science and Technology of Water Resources, Qi Pu published a research paper entitled “Great changes on the Lower Yellow River channel since 2000 and future prospective [sic].” In this paper, Qi states: “With the construction of large hydropower projects on its upper and middle reaches and the development of soil-water conservation and irrigation projects, the probability that a big flood event will occur [has been greatly reduced alongside] flood peak discharges.”
“There are at least 600 dams and reservoirs on different scales along either the main course or branches of the Yellow River, with total storage capacity amounting to over 70 billion cubic meters, surpassing the river’s yearly runoff,” Qi told our reporter. “With these reservoirs’ high adjustment capability, the possibility of flooding has been greatly lowered. Meanwhile, because of sediment retained in the reservoirs, especially sediment regulation by Xiaolangdi Reservoir, and sediment release at the right time by floods, raising of the riverbed will not occur. Thus, the proposed grand relocation project in Henan is not necessary.”
