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亚洲时报：荒芜的土地--中国的水资源危机（共四部分）
【中文标题】荒芜的土地：中国的水资源危机 第四部分 － 环境的破坏让中国觉醒（完）
【原文标题】The Ruined Land: China's Water Crisis. PART 4: China awakens to its devastated environment
【登载媒体】亚洲时报
【原文链接】http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/EH29Ad01.html
【译者】满仓
1998年，中国遭遇了前所未有的洪水灾害，中国政府终于愤怒地认识到几千年来环境不断恶化的灾难性后果。而且，中国共产党错误地认为环境应该服从人的意志，这更加快了环境恶化的速度。
当长江和其它河流的河水溢出堤坝的时候，上千万居民流离失所，200多万名士兵、武装警察和预备役民兵被应征救援。张万年将军说，自从1945年到1949年国共战争开始，这是中国最大的一次军事行动。
暴雨反季节地异常狂下，这还是个小问题，更大的问题是在长江起源地的山坡上，根本就没有土壤、树木和任何可以阻拦洪水的表层物体。至少4000人被淹死，经济损失360亿美元。长江盆地的井水全部被污染，哈尔滨的油田也被洪水冲垮。
在以前，大自然被人类强行控制以满足生产生活的需求，现在双方的角色要换过来了。当时的总理朱镕基突然宣布了一个向后转的政策，他要求立即执行一项动议，全国范围内禁止砍伐森林，开始植树造林，并且给一些湖泊重新蓄水。这个将耗费120亿美元、影响到3亿农民、跨度10年的计划，将让中国消耗掉所有的粮食储备来把大地恢复成森林和草原。
林业部启动了一个30年的计划，种植2600万公顷的森林来避免水资源和土壤的流失，中国在这方面被认为是世界上做得最差的国家。在毛泽东时代，农民们被鼓励在山坡上的梯田种植农作物，试图达到荒唐的产量目标。现在，坡度超过25度的梯田都要被用来栽种树木、灌木和草坪。
在长江和淮河密集的冲积平原地区，大约250万农民被重新安置在这里，响应“恢复耕地、重造湖泊、建设城市”的号召。朱毫不畏惧没有做过任何事先研究会带来的后果，他命令这些农民放弃曾经花费了无数人力修建的数千公里堤坝，转而去把洞庭湖恢复到1949年以前的储水量。
然而，实际情况是，这需要几代人的时间才可以在中国西部恢复足够的森林，来阻止土壤流失，阻止洪水泛滥。这不仅仅会为曾经那些不幸的植树造林计划添上不光彩的一笔，1979年提出的“绿色长城”计划就是其中之一。而且事实是，自然生长的森林可以用它低矮的灌木丛和树叶堆积的肥料来吸附和过滤雨水，人工种植的树木根本无法起到这样的作用。
接下来发生的事情就是永久性持续的表面文章了。执政党在改变中国的自然条件道路上走得越远，他们就需要修建更多的大坝来解决所发生的问题。实际上，中国最好还是通过保护山顶或高原上的自然森林来控制洪水，它们可以有效地吸附降水，确保在低海拔的湖泊和湿地可以在夏天容纳更多的洪水量。试图用人工水库来代替大自然的安排无论如何是一个高成本的错误。
中国共产党正在实施的大型水坝工程目的仅仅是为了存积淤泥，在世界银行贷款10亿美元横跨黄河的小浪底水坝项目就是一个例子。另外一个例子是横跨金沙江的220米高的溪洛渡大坝，它的设计目的是将三分之一可能堆积到三峡水库的淤泥截流。这些大坝工程除了要为其花费巨额的隐形成本之外，比如拦截淤泥、上百万人的重新安置、清理河床、防止污染等，更重要的问题是，它们在发电方面只可以起到短期的作用。
为了建设小浪底工程，将近40万人被迫迁移，但是它在未来20年里就会失去作用，因为下游的水库会完全被淤泥填满。如果不进行耗资巨大的全面修整，毛时代修建的那些沿淮河流域的大坝没有一个会持续运作20年以上。三峡大坝的设计使用年限是70年，但是看起来也不会和这些项目的寿命有太大的不同。
在建设项目开工之前，三峡工程的支持者们故意地错误估算工程成本，声称项目成本只有110亿美元，重新安置成本只有50亿美元。虽然目前最终的成本数字还很难准确计算，但是很可能会达到700亿美元，而不是现在说的280亿美元，这会让三峡电厂的发电成本为世界之最。
当然修建大坝的工程还有其它很多目的。这个国家在基础建设上投入的巨额资金经常被用来做一些无关紧要的事情：通往西藏的铁路、把北京建设成奥运会城市、人类太空行走、北京到上海的磁悬浮列车等等，这些项目帮助中国经济多年来一直按8％的比率增长。通常，这些项目会使用囚犯或士兵作为劳动力，它们的劳动力成本接近于零。三峡大坝的大部分施工工作都是由人民解放军的一个师来承担的，农民们说有很多监狱里的犯人被用来做修路和架桥的重体力劳动。
对于中国的西部地区来说，那里几乎没有吸引外国投资的能力，大坝工程也算是对不发达地区的一种津贴。这些工程项目通过让汉族人更方便地进入地形险恶的山区，可以更好地促进西藏、四川和云南等少数民族地区的殖民地化。
这些宏伟项目的人力成本依然很难给出一个准确的数字。尽管中国尽力从以前重新安置移民工作中犯的错误吸取教训，但是和其它项目一样，三峡大坝工程依然招致了大规模的侵犯人权的谴责声音。
当项目在1991年开始的时候，中国宣称只有75万人需要迁移。实际上，在2008年项目结束时，如果考虑到人口的自然增长因素，几乎可以肯定有190万人被重新安置。
这些人没有得到什么补偿，而且政府似乎根本没有打算补偿他们。最初的重新安置整体预算是175亿元人民币，到2000年，预算被提高到287亿元。但是最终花费的重新安置费用可能会达到1000亿元，这笔钱的大部分还是来自被安置的农民身上。水库区的这些农民是中国，当然也是世界上，最贫穷的群体，他们的年平均收入只有120美元。开县148.8万人口中的10万人需要被迁移。在1958年到1962年大跃进时期发生的饥荒中，这个地区村镇中的一半人口被饿死。
1979年之后，当地人第一批前赴沿海城市打工，他们每年寄回家乡的现金总额超过10亿元人民币，这些钱支持了大部分留守农民的生活。所谓留守农民，主要是指老人和生病的人，他们在照看庄稼地。中央政府每年向当地拨款上亿元人民币作为补贴，当地人说，一些大型的国有企业全部破产或负债累累。当地几乎没有任何外国投资项目。
开县土地面积有3969平方公里，其中很大一部分，464平方公里，将被淹没。在1995年第一批安置计划中，只有10％的人口需要迁移到其它地区，90％的人只需要移居到附近的山坡上。但是朱镕基发布了保护倾斜度超过25％的山坡的命令，这些人只好去寻找其它的安置地，最终的结果是被安置到四川省和山东省。
当时整个项目的计划宣称水库会覆盖2000万亩未开发的土地，包括贫瘠的山区和山坡草原，其中只有420万亩的可耕种面积。据此推算，被迁移的农民们还会留在附近地区，城镇的工业发展还将继续为失去土地的农民提供就业机会。
实际上，以上这些预测完全没有实现。水库区原城镇的工厂全部关闭，留下10万失业工人。在山坡地上耕种的禁令让12.5万农民被迫迁移到遥远的沿海省份。
国家一遍又一遍地重复承诺，移民们会得到足够的经济补偿，他们在新居住地的生活水平会比原来更高，还承诺给每个移民4万元的安置费。这些事情也都没有发生。
移民们的安置费都被当地官员侵吞了，他们只拿出每人4000到8000元的补偿款。很多移居外省的农民要求返回原居住地，他们抱怨在新地方找不到工作，当地的政府和社区不欢迎他们，甚至还攻击他们。有大约20％的人已经回到了家乡，其他被安置在青岛和上海附近的人进行了示威游行。留在原地的人民写了无数的请愿书，抱怨当地政府在压榨他们，用错误的方法来计算他们应得的补偿金。
安置政策是由北京中央政府提出的，但是实际上是由乡镇一级政府按照他们自己的规定来执行的。在“发展安置”的思想指引下，政府完全可以避开直接补偿现金的做法。而是把补偿金直接较到当地政府手中，而他们则按照自己的思路把钱用来实施其它基础建设或工业项目。
安置工作的重担落在了农村管理者的肩上，同事也不成比例地落在农村最贫穷的人群身上，这些人大部分每年的收入只有120美元。整个事情按照“越贫穷得钱越少”的原则在发展。一项统计显示，被安置人员中最穷困的40％人群只得到了总安置预算的20％。
55％的移民被安置到城市地区，尽管他们的境况比以前好一些，但是他们都在抱怨被欺骗了。原因很简单，补偿款项的计算方法是根据政府在1992年调查得到的居民财产价值。那时候中国还是计划经济，还处于1989年经济制裁造成的衰退期。
十年之后，这些移民必须要用市场价格购买十年前建筑的房子，就市场发展的情况来看，这要比政府给他们的补偿金贵出至少三倍。用另一个方式来说，修建大坝所产生的安置费中的三分之二不是由政府来承担的，而是由被迫离开他们的土地和家园的失业人员来承担的。
新房子无可争议地要比他们离开的老房子好很多，现代化的生活设施和更大的空间，人们因为知道那些老房子早晚会被拆除，所以没有人会去投资购买。即使如此，被安置到城市生活的人们并不表示感激，而是依然愤怒，觉得被欺骗了。房地产公司和国家土地都被党内精英把持，在这项安置工作中他们都捞足了钱。
即使这些新修建的公路、铁路、机场和通讯设施真的为这个曾经被忽略的地区吸引到了投资，而且投资人可以按照自己的标准雇用任何人，那么也仅仅意味着那些30岁左右、受过良好教育、具备适应能力的年轻人可以找到工作，老人们依然命中注定没有工作。
尽管中国已经在《公民权利和政治权利国际公约》和其它类似公约上签字，并承诺提供运动、意见和结社的自由，但是任何敢于组织示威的人马上会被逮捕。修建大坝的举措为这个政治系统的维系提供了支持，它让国家从个人手中剥夺了更多的权力。
原文：
In 1998, China suffered flooding so extensive that the central government was finally - and rudely - awakened to the devastating effects of thousands of years of environmental degradation and the accelerating damage that occurred when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) erroneously thought it could bend nature to its will.
As the Yangtze and other rivers spilled over their banks, tens of millions of people were driven from their homes. More than 2 million soldiers, paramilitary police and reservists were called into service in what General Zhang Wannian said at the time was the largest military deployment since the 1945-49 civil war that put the communists in power.
While the rains were unseasonably heavy, however, the real concern was not the rain but the fact that there was no topsoil, there were no forests, and there was no ground cover to hold the waters in place in the mountains where the Yangtze originates. At least 4,000 people were drowned. Economic costs ran to more than US$36 billion. Wells were poisoned throughout the Yangtze River basin. Oilfields in Harbin were flooded.
Where before nature had to be harnessed to conform to the needs of the state, now there was a drastic change. The then premier, Zhu Rongji, suddenly announced an about-face. He set in motion a national ban on logging old forests and a huge reforestation program, and ordered restoration of some of the lakes. Under a 10-year scheme costing $12 billion and involving 300 million peasants, the state will empty its bulging state granaries to return fields into pasture and forest land.
The Ministry of Forestry envisages a 30-year plan to plant 26 million hectares of forest to reverse water and soil erosion that is described as perhaps the worst in the world. Under Mao Zedong, peasants had been encouraged to terrace steep slopes in the mountains and hills to create more fields to meet absurd grain targets. Now any terraces steeper than 25 degrees are to be replanted with grasses, bushes and trees.
Along the crowded floodplains of the Yangtze and the Huai, some 2.5 million peasants are being relocated under the slogan "return the field, restore the lake, build towns". Undaunted by the absence of any preparatory research, Zhu ordered them out and told them to abandon many of the thousands of kilometers of laboriously constructed dikes to restore Dongting Lake to its pre-1949 size.
The reality, though, is that it will take generations to restore enough forests to western China to curb the soil erosion and to stop the flash floods. It is not just the lamentable record of past mass afforestation projects - the "green great wall" announced in 1979 is just one of these plans - but the fact is that the tree plantations envisaged are nowhere near as useful at absorbing and filtering rainwater as natural forests with their thick undergrowth and leaf compost.
What is instead happening is a kind of public works in perpetual motion. The more problems the Party creates by altering China's plumbing system, the more dams it needs to solve the fresh problems created. In reality, China would have been better off controlling floods by preserving natural forests in the mountainous uplands, which absorb rainfall, and keeping the lakes and wetland in the lower reaches to absorb the summer floods. Trying to substitute nature's arrangements with man-made reservoirs has been a costly failure.
The CCP is now embarking on major dam projects whose purpose is simply to trap sediment. The Xiaolangdi Dam across the Yellow River, with a $1 billion World Bank loan, is one example. Another is the 220-meter-high Xiluodu Dam across the Golden Sands River. It is designed to cut by a third the silt that will otherwise accumulate in the Three Gorges Dam reservoir. Beyond the hidden cost of making these dams work - trapping the silt, resettling millions, cleaning the riverbeds, stopping the pollution - is the fact that many of these dams have a very short life in generating electricity.
Within 20 years, the Xiaolangdi Dam, for which nearly 400,000 people had to be moved, will probably be useless, as the reservoir behind it will have silted up entirely. None of the dams built in the Mao era along the Huai River have lasted more than 20 years before needing extensive and costly renovation. The Three Gorges Dam, which is supposed to have a 70-year life, is not likely to turn out to be any different.
Before construction started, the proponents of the Three Gorges deliberately misrepresented the true cost of building it, claiming it would cost just US$11 billion to build plus $5 billion for resettlement. Just what exactly the final tally will be is hard to say with certainty, but it will probably be about $70 billion instead of the $28 billion now talked about, thus making its electricity among the most expensive ever produced.
Certainly the dam-building serves other useful purposes. The vast infrastructure spending of the state - often on such boondoggles as a railway to Tibet, turning Beijing into an Olympic city, manned space travel, a maglev train to Shanghai, etc - are helping to keep the wheels of the economy spinning at the desired annual rate of 8 percent for a long time to come. Often the manpower used for these projects are convicts or soldiers whose labor costs next to nothing. Much of the Three Gorges construction work is carried out by units of the People's Liberation Army. Peasants say squads of prison labor are used to do the heavy work in constructing local roads and bridges.
The dams are also a form of subsidy to the underdeveloped regions in the west, where there is little foreign investment. And they serve to complete the colonization of the minority border lands of Tibet, Sichuan and Yunnan, by facilitating the migration of Han Chinese to these hitherto inaccessible mountainous regions.
Yet the human cost of these grandiose schemes is harder to put a price tag on. Although China has tried to learn from the mistakes made in resettling those displaced by such schemes, the Three Gorges project, like the others, is used to justify large-scale human-rights abuses.
When the project was put forward in 1991, the state claimed that only 750,000 people would have to be moved. In fact, by the time the project is finished in 2008, it will almost certainly be as many as 1.9 million, given the natural population increase.
There was no money for these people and the state probably never had any intention of compensating them. The original budget for resettlement was put at 17.5 billion yuan ($2.15 billion). By 2000, the resettlement budget was put at 28.7 billion yuan. But the true cost of rehousing them will probably be 100 billion yuan, most of which will have to come from the people themselves. The peasants in the reservoir area rank among the poorest in China, indeed in the world, with average annual cash incomes of about $120. Take Kaixian county, where 100,000 are being relocated out of a population of 1,468,000. During the famine of the 1958-62 Great Leap Forward, half the inhabitants of many villages perished.
After 1979, the locals were among the first to go out and seek work in the coastal provinces, and their remittances now amount to as much as a billion yuan a year, which support mosts of the rural population. Only the old and sick stay at home and tend the farms. The central government provides hundreds of millions of yuan in subsidies each year to the county and locals say all the government-owned enterprises are bankrupt or heavily indebted. There is little or no foreign investment.
A relatively large part of Kaxian's territory will be inundated - 464 square kilometers of cultivated land of a total land area of 3,969 square kilometers. In the first resettlement plan drawn up in 1995, only 10 percent of the migrants were supposed to be relocated outside of the district, so that 90 percent of them were supposed to be relocated on mountain slopes. After Zhu Rongji's decision to protect slopes steeper than 25 degrees, land had to be found for settlers elsewhere, and the majority are being relocated in Sichuan province or sent to Shandong province on the coast.
When the plans for the entire project were presented it was claimed that 20 million mu (1,334,000 hectares; a mu is a traditional measurement of land equivalent to 667 square meters) of undeveloped land - barren mountains and grassy slopes - were in the reservoir area, of which 4.2 million mu (280,140 hectares) was arable. Therefore, it was said that the displaced peasants could remain in the region. The industrial development of the towns was also supposed to create new jobs for landless villagers.
In fact, none of this turned out to be true. All the factories in the towns and cities in the reservoir area have been shut, leaving at least 100,000 workers without jobs. Then the ban on farming on steep slopes meant that 125,000 peasants had to be resettled in provinces far away on the coast.
The state repeatedly promised that those displaced would be given adequate compensation and guaranteed that they would enjoy higher living standards after moving. The state promised to budget 40,000 yuan per head in resettlement finding. None of this has happened either.
The resettlement funds were commandeered by local officials, who handed out 4,000-8,000 yuan in compensation. Many of those sent out of the reservoir area have demanded to return, complaining that they can find no work, are unwelcome, and in some cases attacked by the host communities. In general about 20 percent have returned on their own account. Others who settled in Qingdao or near Shanghai have organized protest marches. Those who stayed in their native counties have written numerous petitions, complaining that they have been squeezed by local officials who have used false figures when calculating their compensation entitlements.
The resettlement policies are drawn up by the central government in Beijing but are actually implemented by county-level governments according to their own regulations. Under a philosophy of "development resettlement", the state is free to avoid compensating people directly. Instead, state resettlement funds are often put directly into the hands of the local governments, which then spend it as they see fit on building new infrastructure or launching industrial projects.
The burden of the resettlement falls heaviest on the rural community and disproportionately heavily on the poorest of the rural poor. Many of these being moved earn about $120 a year. The system operates according to the principle that the poorer you are the less you get. According to one calculation, the poorest 40 percent of the relocatees will only get 20 percent of the allocated funds.
About 55 percent of those forced to move have been resettled in urban areas and, although they are treated better, they all complain of being cheated. The reason is simple. Compensation payments are based on a calculation of property values based on a government survey carried out in 1992, when China was still a planned economy, in recession and suffering from economic sanctions after 1989.
Ten years later, those displaced now have to buy housing sold 10 years ago at commercial prices, which as a rule of thumb cost three times what the government is giving them. Put another way, two-thirds of the resettlement cost of the dam is now being borne not by the state but by the people forced off their land or out of their homes who have no jobs.
The new housing is admittedly far superior to that which they left, with modern plumbing and more space than the cramped housing that no one had cared to invest in, in the knowledge that it would one day be abandoned. Even so, most of the urban population do not feel grateful but rather cheated and angry. The construction companies and the land are controlled by the Party elite, who are naturally getting extremely rich on the proceeds.
Even if all this attracts investment to a neglected area, those who come and invest in a region that is benefiting from impressive new roads, railways, airports and communication facilities are now free to employ whomever they want. This usually means younger people over 30, who are better educated and more adaptable, leaving the elder generation doomed to unemployment.
Although China has signed up to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and other treaties designed to provide freedom of movement, opinion and association, anyone daring to organize a protest is soon arrested. The dam-building serves to buttress a political system that elevates the demands of the state over the rights of the individual. |
狗仔卡
发表于 2009-10-30 12:05
提升卡
变色卡
抢沙发
千斤顶
显身卡
发表于 2009-10-30 12:16
