China has announced it will relocate around 300,000 more people than planned to make way for the Three Gorges Dam, bringing the total number displaced for the giant project to over 1.4 million. China had expected to resettle 1.13 million people but that figure has already been surpassed, well before the project goes into full operation in 2008, the official Xinhua news agency said in a report late Sunday.
The number of people displaced by the dam is expected to top 1.4 million people, Xinhua said, citing the head of the central government's Three Gorges Project Construction Committee, Pu Haiqing.
The 22.5-billion-dollar Three Gorges Dam, in central China's Hubei province, will be the world's biggest hydropower project — generating 84.7 billion kilowatts of electricity annually.
It dams the nation's longest river, the Yangtze, and while the Chinese government has hailed it as a solution to a series of national problems, the project has drawn heavy fire from environmental and social critics.
Human rights groups have said, contrary to China's assertions, that villagers have been forced from their homes, had their traditional ways of life destroyed and sent to live in cities against their will.
Questions have also been raised over whether the displaced people have received adequate compensation, concerns highlighted by the many cases of official corruption in relation to the project.
A Chinese official was in December last year found guilty of stealing 2.8 million yuan (354,000 dollars) that should have been used for compensating farmers who had been resettled because of the construction work.
The official, Du Jiang, who worked at the Land Resources Bureau in southwest China's Chongqing municipality, was sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve for stealing the money, state press reports said at the time.
In the Chinese legal system, a death sentence with a two-year reprieve routinely ends up being commuted to life in jail.
That case was reported to be one of the biggest incidents of graft in relation to the dam, although another official was sentenced to death in February 2000 for embezzling 12 million yuan from the project.
By the end of 2004, 327 cases of embezzlement of resettlement funds had been discovered with 55.8 million yuan missing, the China Daily newspaper reported last year.
More recent figures on embezzlement were not immediately available.
Thirteen years of construction work on the project officially ended in May this year when the dam's main 2,309-meter-long (7,620-feet), 185-meter-high concrete wall put in place.
It will become fully operational in 2008 after more power generators are installed and extra work done on the ship lift that will allow ocean-going vessels to go far inland along the vast reservoir filling up behind the dam.
The water level in the reservoir has yet to reach its peak of 175 meters. Those still to be relocated will do so as the water level rises, Xinhua cited Pu as saying.
The current water level of the reservoir is just over 142 meters, according to an article posted Monday on the website of the People's Daily newspaper.
China says the dam is essential as a source of hydropower and to stop the flooding along the Yangtze that has killed countless people and destroyed farmland for centuries, as well as allow big ships to travel further inland.
