China Rising: Power to the People

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The mere presence of environmentalists marks a sea change. When Beijing approved the massive Three Gorges Dam in 1992, public opposition was nearly impossible. The $24 billion hydropower station at the center of the project, now under construction, will turn the middle of the Yangtze into a lake half the length of California and force 1.5 million people to relocate. Since the dam was conceived as a monument to Communist Party power, opponents were branded as dissidents. Reforms have changed that. "The government sees activist groups as less of a threat now," says Fu Tao, of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. "With China calling for an environmentally friendly Olympics in 2008, it's even promised to give them a voice."

Activists had virtually no voice until the 1990s, when Beijing allowed nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to register in large numbers. Today China has 280,000 NGOs, ranging from Ping-Pong clubs to cancer-survivor groups to economic think tanks. Consider them potential interest groups--what social scientists call a budding "civil society"--that will demand a say in government policy. The most active by far are environmentalists. They notched their first triumph in 1998 by blocking a logging scheme in Yunnan province that would have imperiled the rare golden monkey. Today they have graduated to representing people.

Yu Xiaogang, 53, the founder of Green Watershed, realized that the millions of villagers affected by China's 80,000 dams are a powerful weapon. Tens of thousands facing relocation in Sichuan province rioted last October over compensation for their paddy lands along the Dadu River. They formed a "dare-to-die brigade" that held a local official hostage until Beijing dispatched paramilitary police to the area. At least two smaller demonstrations followed in neighboring provinces. Since the media are barred from reporting on trouble at dam sites, peasants remain ignorant of resettlement problems elsewhere. "If people know what's happened at other dams, they can better engage their own governments peacefully," Yu says.

Last summer Yu chartered a bus and drove peasants from a proposed dam area along the upper Salween to visit a 10-year-old dam a few hours away. The government had celebrated the Manwan Dam as a model of development for its cheap electricity and successful relocation of 3,500 people. The visitors saw something different: peasant women picking through the hydropower station's garbage dump for plastic bottles to recycle for pennies. Sobbing, the women explained that they had not found jobs after losing their land. The scene was captured in an underground documentary that environmentalists have passed hand to hand. It concludes with the visitors returning home to warn their families not to believe claims that relocations will mean a good life.