China's large project emigration has achieved great progress, the emigration work of Xiaolangdi water conservancy and Ertan hydropower projects has become a successful example recommended by the World Bank.
Zhang Jirao, vice minister of Water Resources, made the remark at the "International Seminar on Emigration and Social Development" in Nanjing on May 12. He said that involuntary emigration is a tough problem in the world. Every country's project construction will involve involuntary emigration, especially, the large-scale infrastructure and resource development projects will involve a large number of emigrants.
After a long period of study on the problem China combined the needs for emigration with the improvement of emigrants' living conditions. Since the reform and opening up, the Chinese government has worked out a series of regulations on emigration, basically setting up an emigration management system. This has not only upgraded the emigration work to a new stage, but also promoted the development of scientific research on the problem.
In the past 50 years, China conducted hydropower construction on a large scale. It has built 86,000 various reservoirs, 26,000 kilometers of embankments, resulting in an emigration of some 12 million people. The successful emigration, such as from the Three Gorges and from other large projects has helped China accumulate plentiful experience in this field and this has aroused a great attention in the world.
China's successful experience mainly benefits from government's scientific plan and rational management. Emigration task will be heavier and more arduous along with the implementation of the western development strategy, the South-to-North Water Diversion Project and the West-East Electricity Transmission Project.
Present at the seminar are some 30 experts from Australia, Germany, India, America and 100 experts from China's related ministries, institutes of high learning and institutions for scientific researches.
(People's Daily May 13, 2002)
