China water resettlement: 'Honest folk have lost out'

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/sep/09/china-water-resettlement

Visitors to Wang Baoying's new house must tread softly or they will frighten her son. The four-year-old boy is not afraid of strangers. He is terrified his home will fall down.

This is not just the fear of a childish imagination. Wang's concrete home – built this year to resettle migrants from China's latest and greatest hydro-engineering project – wobbles when she walks. Her neighbour's floor has completely collapsed. Another's bedroom is tilting. There are cracks on many of the walls.

"My son cries every night because he thinks the house might collapse," says Wang, who discovered the problems three days after she moved in to Shuitianyang new village. "It's terrible. The authorities told us this would be a perfect home."

The former farmer is one of 345,000 people who are being relocated in a desperate bid to ease Beijing's drought crisis with a transfusion of water from the Yangtze basin, 1,277km to the south. Her old home and farmland will soon be flooded by the central leg of three vast channels that make up the £40bn South-North water diversion, a 50-year project to replenish the arid north of China. According to US diplomatic cables released via WikiLeaks last week, the project is plagued by pollution and misconceived.