Title: Thousands being moved from China's Three Gorges - again | Reuters
Headings: Thousands being moved from China's Three Gorges - again
Thousands being moved from China's Three Gorges - again
RECONSTRUCTION

Content: “If the government says you have to move, you move,” said Shuai Linxiang, a 57-year-old woman among 20,000 people to be relocated from Huangtupo, where they were resettled in 1998. “ We can’t oppose them.” The Three Gorges dam was completed in July when its final turbine joined the national grid and the facility reached its full capacity of 22.5 gigawatts, more than enough to power Pakistan or Switzerland. As the dam was being built on the Yangtze River, in central Hubei province, authorities moved 1.3 million people who lived in what became its 1,045 sq km (405 sq mile) reservoir, an area greater in size than Singapore. Reuters was recently given a rare tour of the 181-metre (600-ft) tall dam and reservoir. In a sign of how sensitive the fresh relocations are, plainclothes security men and people who identified themselves as officials from the “news department” followed Reuters reporters around the area for three days, hindering interviews by intimidating locals with their presence. Since word of the new resettlement has filtered out, Shuai and her neighbors have become known in China as “Three Gorges’ immigrants, once again”. They were moved to Huangtupo in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the reservoir began to consume their original town. Besides 20,000 people in Huangtupo, another 100,000 may be moved in the next three to five years because of geological risks, Liu Yuan, an official with the Ministry of Land and Resources in Beijing said in April, according to state-run China National Radio. The number of “geological hazards” had risen 70 percent since water levels in the reservoir reached a maximum of 175 meters (574 ft), he said, without elaborating, although he was believed to be referring to landslides.