Abstract
Studies of dam resettlement in China tend to focus on those who remain in resettlement sites, producing a distorted discourse of life after resettlement. Households and individuals often move out of resettlement sites but, because they are difficult to trace, there is limited research about them. It is estimated that 30 per cent of resettled households emigrated from the Three Gorges Dam resettlement site. To explore this and contribute to the limited research about emigration after resettlement, this chapter asks: Who left the Three Gorges after resettlement? Why did they leave? Where did they go? To understand what may have led to emigration we analyse the livelihoods of 178 households who responded to a survey in 2003, but were no longer living at the same resettlement site in 2012. We find low-income rural households and higher income urban households were more likely than their cohort averages to have left the resettlement between 2003 and 2011. This provides initial evidence that a range of push and pull factors influence the decision to leave resettlement sites. These dynamics have been overlooked in the resettlement literature, potentially skewing assessments of resettlement outcomes.
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Notes
- 1.
See Article XIII of the Regulations for Resettlement for Large and Medium Hydropower and Water Conservation Projects. For more on resettlement policies, see the chapters by Tilt and Chen as well as Habich-Sobiegalla and Plümmer, this volume.
- 2.
In the 1990s, SLA emerged from the academic literature on participatory development and was used extensively by development agencies to plan and assess development projects. More recently, it has been the subject of extensive critique (Scoones 2009; Reddy et al. 2015; Smyth and Vanclay 2017), in particular for the complexity of translating the framework into practice at the project level. Nonetheless, at the time of our research it was widely accepted and, despite its shortcomings, provided a useful framework for framing our research questions in the Three Gorges. For more details on our research methods and limitations, see Wilmsen (2016a) and Wilmsen and van Hulten (2017).
- 3.
Follow-up analysis revealed that of the 178 non-respondents in 2012, 17 households had passed away sometime between 2003 and 2012.
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The authors acknowledge funding from the Australian Research Council, grant DE120101037.
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Wilmsen, B., van Hulten, A., Duan, Y. (2021). Leaving the Three Gorges After Resettlement: Who Left, Why Did They Leave, and Where Did They Go?. In: Rousseau, JF., Habich-Sobiegalla, S. (eds) The Political Economy of Hydropower in Southwest China and Beyond. International Political Economy Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59361-2_3
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