The Hanyi High-speed Railway, which links the provincial capital Wuhan and Yichang city, is expected to open in May. The collapsed part has already undergone test runs.

The roadbed of a 300-meter section rail in Qianjiang city collapsed Friday afternoon. Workers working the section said heavy rain in the past few days may have caused the problem.

The collapse came just days after a contractor on the rail line was accused of cutting corners in construction, and then distorting a supposedly independent quality assessment. From Global Times, via Seeing Red in China:

A Time Weekly report said Thursday that CGGC’s earth supplier Ni Hongjun reported to the authorities in 2010 that CGGC employees replaced at least 90,000 cubic meters of spall [crushed rock] with earth for personal benefit, causing serious safety risks for high-speed trains and passengers.

However, a “third-party” inspection report released in September 2011 by the Civil Engineering Testing Center of Central South University said, under the influence of CGGC, that the project was “qualified”. The report prevented the authorities and the public from knowing the truth ….

The Wuhan-Yichang high-speed railway runs in Central China’s Hubei Province, an area prone to flooding caused by the Yangtze River and its tributaries. Replacing spall with earth for the project amounts to building a house on the foundation of cake, the source said.

See also Seeing Red in China’s post on the collapse, which it describes as “a tragedy averted by luck”.

High-speed rail safety has been a particularly sensitive issue in China since last year’s Wenzhou disaster, which killed 40 people. Poor construction was a major source of public anger following the widespread collapse of school buildings during the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake, but nevertheless remains rife.

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Post tags: construction project, high-speed rail, high-speed rail crash, Hubei, safety, wenzhou, wuhan, Yangtze River
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Although the high profile Chinese artist Ai Weiwei finally resurfaced after more than 11 weeks in detention on 21 June, many lesser known figures are still languishing in Chinese jails following a round up of activists earlier this year. Wang Lihong is a case in point — and an example of how injustice begets injustice in China’s dysfunctional legal system.

Wang Lihong has a long history of activism, including work on behalf of petitioners who have suffered violence at the hands of the authorities and campaigns for Chinese lawyers targeted because of their advocacy work. Like Ai Weiwei, Wang was rounded up in the weeks following anonymous online posts calling for a “Jasmine Revolution” in China earlier this year. She has now been in detention for 17 weeks. On 21 March she was charged with “inciting social unrest,” but on 22 April this charge was reduced to “disturbing public transportation in a crowd.”

Oiwan Lam recently posted details of Wang’s career and the campaign to release her at Global Voices Online, including a partial list of the causes with which she has been involved since 2008:

1. The police murder case of Yang Jia on July 1 2008. She visited Yang Jia’s mother and interviewed her and blogged about Yang Jia’s case.

2. Together with another blogger, Temple Tiger, she helped the homeless people around Tienanmen square.

3. The Deng Yujiao self defense murder case in May 2009. Wang Lihong travelled to Hubei to join the “surrounding gaze” flash mob in order to pressure the court for an open and fair ruling on Deng’s case.

4. On May 2009, Wang campaigned for a visit to petitioner, Yao Jing, who was seriously injured by local government officials from Linyi who tried to intercept her petition in Beijing. Together with a group of bloggers, Wang raised donation for Yao Jing’s hospital and lawyer expenses.

5. Campaigned for human rights lawyer Ni Yulan, who was prosecuted by Beijing authority soon after she was released from jail.

6. Participated in the “surrounding gaze” flash mob action in support of the three Fujian netizens who was accused by local authorities for defamation in their citizen reports about a suspected rape case in March and April 2010.

7. Celebrated the Nobel Prize award to Liu Xiaobo in October 2010. She was detained for two weeks and was under house arrest for several months.

8. In March 2011, she visited two activists in a Henan detention center, Wang Yi who was sentenced to one year labour education for writing a tweet and Tian Xi, an AIDS activist.

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Post tags: Ai Weiwei, AIDS, Beijing, Deng Yujiao, detention, Fujian, Henan, Hubei, jasmine revolution, Liu Xiaobo, Ni Yulan, Nobel Prize, Yang Jia
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China ordered the operator of the world’s biggest dam to begin disgorging about 5 billion cubic meters of water today to replenish the Yangtze River and counter the Hubei region’s lowest rainfall in half a century.

The Three Gorges Dam will discharge enough water to fill 2 million Olympic-sized swimming pools by June 10, according to a government statement. Lower water levels on the 6,264-kilometer (3,915-mile) river may increase China’s oil demand by 300,000 barrels a day to make up for lost hydropower generation, Barclays Capital said last week.

China’s longest river sustains 65.7 percent of the nation’s paddy fields, according to the Agricultural Yearbook. Poyang Lake, China’s biggest, has shrunk to less than a fifth of its usual area, the country’s meteorological agency said. State-run China Daily said there was 40 percent less water in almost 1,600 reservoirs in Hubei province than a year ago.

The record-low rainfall in the Hubei region has caused the worst drought in fifty years. From the Financial Times:

The monsoon rains that usually flood southern China’s middle Yangtze river in spring did not come this year, and officials say rainfall in Hubei, Jiangxi, Anhui, Jiangsu and Zhejiang is at its lowest level in more than 50 years

While droughts are not uncommon in China, water shortages have steadily worsened during the past decade, as increased agricultural irrigation and worsening water contamination have hit supplies. China’s available water per capita is just a quarter of the world average and the lowest of any large economy, according to the World Bank.

Water releases from the Three Gorges reservoir, which is upstream from the drought areas, will be increased by 10-20 per cent today, according to the State Flood Control and Drought Relief Office.

Water has already been released at a rate of 10,000 cubic metres per second since last Friday, causing the level of the reservoir to fall by one metre every two days, say dam operators.

In Hubei and Hunan provinces, the drought has threatened drinking supplies for more than 1m people. In neighbouring Jiangxi province, Poyang Lake, China’s largest freshwater lake, has hit a 59-year low and rice transplants around it have stopped.

“It rings a big alarm bell when the Yangtze itself is facing drought,” says Ma Jun, an environmental activist and author of China’s Water Crisis. “The total population supported by this river basin is around 400m people – it’s the most important watershed in China.”

This comes after the Chinese government recently admitted that the Three Gorges Dam faces “urgent problems”. From the Guardian:

The frank assessment of the challenges posed and benefits offered by the dam came amid growing concerns about a drought on the middle stretches of the Yangtze. This has left 1,392 reservoirs in Hubei with only “dead water” and has affected the drinking supplies of more than 300,000 people.

Chinese media reported this month that the Yangtze water levels near Wuhan hit their lowest point since the dam went into operation in 2003. Long stretches have apparently been closed to water traffic after hundreds of boats ran aground in the shallows.

There have been claims that the Three Gorges plant has exacerbated the problem by holding back water for electricity generation, but operators claim they have alleviated the problem by releasing 400m cubic metres of water from the reservoir. As a result the levels have fallen below 156 metres – the amount needed for optimum power generation.

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Post tags: Hubei, Three Gorges Dam, Yangtze River
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[Is] this a real threat? Or is it just sabre-rattling by power companies keen to secure from the authorities increase in state-controlled electricity prices to compensate for rising world coal costs? It’s probably just talk, but nobody can be quite sure.

During the hot summer months ahead, China’s power producers are going to get squeezed by record prices for thermal coal. Because electricity prices, which are set by the state, haven’t risen, thermal power stations are increasingly being run at a loss.

According to analyst Nate Taplin at Gavekal Dragonomics, a financial services firm, China’s thermal power plants lost Rmb33bn last year because of this price squeeze and are reluctant to continue producing power at a loss. As he explains in a recent note:

The problem is not that China produces too little electricity. The warnings of blackouts are instead best understood as a form of blackmail: power producers want the government to raise the prices they get for electricity ….

Taplin predicts private manufacturers may start drawing electricity from diesel generators as rationing becomes more widespread. “Without price hikes to address the structural problem, outages will probably be significant and lead to a bump in diesel demand,” he writes.

Warnings of power shortages were reported by Reuters last week:

Liu Tienan, the head of the energy administration, said supplies of coal, oil, natural gas and power in the first quarter had been steady, the official Xinhua news agency reported late on Monday. But Liu warned the peak summer season was likely to bring strains.

“Owing to excessively heady demand, even with production and supply growth in the double digits, supplies of coal, power and oil in some regions are still tightening, and future trends give no grounds for optimism,” Liu told an official meeting on Monday, according to Xinhua ….

Liu’s comments echoed a warning from the National Energy Administration last week, when it said power demand would grow faster than it previously thought.

The central provinces of Hunan, Jiangxi and Chongqing have introduced power use curbs since March, and Hubei province is also likely to impose restrictions, with low coal stocks at power plants and low water levels for hydropower generation.

China Daily, meanwhile, reported similar measures in Zhejiang, which has become reliant on electricity from neighbouring provinces to meet industrial energy demands.

Dai Yan, deputy director of the electricity dispatching center at the Zhejiang branch of the National Grid, said the province is facing severe shortages. Dai said Zhejiang has been buying electricity from neighboring provinces since the start of the year to quench its thirst.

“The demand for electricity intensified after Spring Festival and the shortage has been about 2 to 3 million kilowatts each day,” Dai was quoted as saying by China National Radio. “We have bought all of the available electricity from other provinces.”

He said more than 10 million kilowatt-hours of electricity was being sucked in from neighboring provinces each day in a bid to meet the demands of the province.

The provincial government has been trying to deal with the problem and has been rationing electrical power since early this year.

During the first quarter of the year, more than 500,000 enterprises in the province were operating according to a rotating electricity supply schedule ….

In some energy-hungry industries – such as chemical and non-ferrous metal manufacturing – demand has shot up by as much as 20 percent compared to last year.

A recent study from the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, cited in the beyondbrics post, predicts with relative optimism that China’s energy demands will start to level off in 15 years, but even so will not peak until mid-century.

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Post tags: Chongqing, coal burning power, electricity, energy demand, Hubei, Hunan, hydropower projects, Jiangxi, power shortages, Zhejiang
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Residents of Xichuan County, Henan, which is located near the Danjiangkou Reservoir, will move to more than 80 resettlement sites in other parts of the province, said the Henan provincial headquarters for relocation in the water diversion project’s Danjiangkou Reservoir area.

The resettlement will take four months to complete, according to a statement released by the headquarters.

Henan previously relocated 11,000 residents living near the reservoir in 2009 and another 64,900 in 2010 ….

The middle route, which will be completed in 2014, involves the relocation of 345,000 people living in close proximity to the Danjiangkou Reservoir, the source of the middle route and administered by neighboring Hubei Province.

Read more about the South-North Water Diversion project and the displacement of communities by reservoirs via CDT. An LA Times article from late last year offers a good overview of the water diversion project and the range of different perspectives on it. See also International Rivers’ coverage of the project.

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Post tags: Henan, Hubei, reservoirs, resettlement, south-to-north water diversion project
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A million Deng Yujiaos

Badong is a county in the western part of Hubei, dissected from west to east by two of the three gorges. It is rich in history, quite poor in land quality and resources, and undergoing a massive change due to the gigantic Three Gorges Dam that flooded part of the county.

It was here at the county seat, a town of about 50,000 people resting on steep slopes above the Yangze, that a young waitress was sexually attacked on the night of May 10th last year. She defended herself from the rapist, who happened to be a communist party official, stabbing him to death in the course of their struggle. The woman’s name was Deng Yujiao, a name that is now a symbol to many in China. She was, however, a real woman working at a real hotel in this very real town. That hotel no longer exists and Deng Yujiao left Badong, has reportedly changed her name and hopefully put this terrible trauma behind her. There are many other Dengs, and these are the stories of just two of them, who were never brave or desperate enough to stab anyone. There is nothing special about them, nothing unusual about their stories: just the kind of things that happen everyday in Badong – and everywhere else. Obviously, the names used here are not their real names.

Deng Yufei is 20 years old and has been working at a hotel in Badong for almost two years, cleaning rooms and making 700 yuan a month. She is originally from a village that was relocated because of the Three Gorges Dam. “Before, my parents could make a living from the crops they were growing, but now they depend on my help,” she explains. So at about seventeen she left her home and moved to Badong town, working first as a waitress and then as a maid in this hotel. She admires Deng Yujiao. “She was in a very difficult situation and she was very brave. I don’t know what I would do if it happened to me, I have been lucky so far.”

It’s an interesting use of the term. She goes on to describe her fabulous luck. “I haven’t been attacked, ever. Of course, guests try to touch me sometimes. The other day a businessman who stayed in that room there came behind me when I was cleaning the bathroom. He hugged me and put his hands under my shirt, but I got away. The first time it happened I told my supervisor and she gave me some advice how to avoid men like this: Try to get to cleaning the room when they’re not in, do everything real fast, don’t look at them, and leave quickly if they try to touch you. She also said that if I really get trapped, I should try and satisfy the man with a hand job. It’s safer this way. I only had to do that once. I am luckier than other girls.”

One of the other girls is Deng Yulan, who works in the same hotel. A few months ago, long after Deng Yujiao was released and left Badong, Deng Yulan was called to bring some food and drinks to a room one night. The guests were two men from another province, she doesn’t know from where exactly. When she put the tray down one of them ordered her to come nearer, saying he wanted “a special.” She turned to leave the room but he stopped her. “I don’t know what happened next. I only remember hands touching me. They were drunk and they couldn’t stop laughing. They shouted at me, “He cha, he cha” (drink tea), they slapped my face with their things. Then I was on the other side of the door. My face was dirty but I still had clothes on, and they threw a wad of bills on the floor near me. There was 1000 Yuan there. I sent the money to my mom and told her I got a bonus because we had to work extra hours. She was very happy: the money was used to pay my brother’s school fees. I haven’t told anyone except my friend (the other hotel worker). My mom would have never understood this. The supervisor said before to come to her if something happens so she can give you a (morning after) pill or help otherwise, but I didn’t need the pill and the people left town the next day, so what can be done? I am not Deng Yujiao.” She now takes classes in English and typing in her spare time, hoping to land a higher paying job as a secretary.

[In June 2009, students staged a protest in Beijing with signs reading, "Anyone could become Deng Yujiao."]

*Rachel’s self-introduction:

I came to China for three months, with a plan to see a bit of Tibet and Sichuan and to get a taste of rural life in this country before I settled down back home with a job at a law firm. Nearly eight years later, I am still in China, and still as fascinated with its rural areas.

After working as a correspondent in Beijing for two years, in July 2010 I have embarked on what I hope will be a six month journey through the Chinese countryside — listening, watching and telling stories from farmers’ lives. Much has been and is still being written about the “Chinese miracle” (or dystopia, depends on your point of view) and this will only be my added two cents. China, it is often said, has more than 400 million Internet users and hundreds of millions of new urban residents, who are changing the face of the country. It is less often noted that China also has another billion people who have not yet been fully included in these new economic and social changes. The following, if you will, are some fragments from the story of the other billion.

My personal blog is Bendilaowai.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2010. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Deng Yujiao, Hubei, other billion, sexual harassment, women
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The Good Earth – abandoned villages in Hubei

Central Hubei offers somewhat dull scenery for the weary traveler: The province is mainly a big dusty plain devoid of character or interest. The highway passes one sleepy village after another, all surrounded by fields and fish ponds. In one of these villages, Zhou Yong grew up and lived until he moved to Wuhan thirteen years ago to work as a mechanic. On the bus he chats away the time, and helpfully reveals a sad truth about this area: The villages aren’t sleepy, they are deserted. The Zhou family seems to be a typical product of the central plains, just a few kilometers north of the Yangtze. Yong’s sister followed him to the city, working as a waitress, and last year, after he bought a small apartment in a suburb, their elderly parents joined, leaving the old house empty and the family’s one Mu of land uncultivated. “We tried to rent it out,” Zhou explains. “But most of the neighbors also left the village so there was no demand.” Nowadays, the family seldom goes to visit the old house. On his way to Yichang on some business, Zhou doesn’t even consider stopping there. As we take in the scenery he details the process through which this fertile plain became a wasteland.

First there were taxes, which got higher every year and made many farmers desert the land or leave it to the care of their wives and move to the cities to generate more income. In recent years, the tax situation improved but farmers are burdened with other expenses: education, healthcare, household equipment. Zhou’s mother decided a farmer’s life holds no future for him. “She was worried I couldn’t find a wife if I stayed in the village,” he recalls. When he graduated from the local middle school, he was sent to work with a relative who was a mechanic in Wuhan, thus acquiring his profession.

“That was almost 15 ago,” says Zhou, now married and the father of a two-year-old son. “Since then, almost all of my classmates from the village moved out, to Wuhan or Yichang (A city in Western Hubei) or to work in other provinces. In recent years, the old generation is also moving out to live with us in the cities. It’s better for them and they help us raise our child.” As the bus speeds along, Zhou points out another reason why farming is no longer an option for many – pollution. We pass one black stream after the other, draining into deserted fields. “Our income got higher when I was in middle school. My father started growing tomatoes in addition to rice then. I am glad, however, that even then my mother was smart enough to see the future is in the cities, not the countryside. A few years later the river from where we drew water to the fields started looking more and more black. Now they can still grow cotton but in Wuhan everyone knows vegetables from this area are bad for your health. Even my family tries to buy food from Hunan instead of our local products. When I first went to the city, my mom would always send vegetables from the village to improve my nutrition. Later, we started buying Hunan vegetables to bring to the village every time we came back to visit. That’s another reason why I wanted my parents to move in with us – this environment is no longer safe for people to live in. It’s a shame as it used to be lovely and I have good memories from growing up here.”

With so many gone to the cities, much of the Hubei plain has become a wasteland dotted with sorry looking trees, dried up fish ponds and those black streams. Zhou thinks the only hope for the area is urban development. “I hope some company will decide to build a factory or something on our land. Then maybe we can get some compensation, maybe move to a bigger apartment.”

*Rachel’s self-introduction:

I came to China for three months, with a plan to see a bit of Tibet and Sichuan and to get a taste of rural life in this country before I settled down back home with a job at a law firm. Nearly eight years later, I am still in China, and still as fascinated with its rural areas.

After working as a correspondent in Beijing for two years, in July 2010 I have embarked on what I hope will be a six month journey through the Chinese countryside — listening, watching and telling stories from farmers’ lives. Much has been and is still being written about the “Chinese miracle” (or dystopia, depends on your point of view) and this will only be my added two cents. China, it is often said, has more than 400 million Internet users and hundreds of millions of new urban residents, who are changing the face of the country. It is less often noted that China also has another billion people who have not yet been fully included in these new economic and social changes. The following, if you will, are some fragments from the story of the other billion.

My personal blog is Bendilaowai.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: agriculture, Hubei, other billion, pollution, rural development
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“This is on a par with the Great Wall, a project essential for the survival of China,” said Wang Shushan, who heads the project in Henan province, where much of the construction is now taking place. “It is a must-do project. We can’t afford to wait ….”

“It is a little like building the tunnel under the English Channel to connect France and England – except we’re moving water, not vehicles,” said Yang Sheya, 38, an engineering supervisor working on the underground aqueduct along the banks of the Yellow River, where it passes just north of Henan’s provincial capital, Zhengzhou.

“They are robbing the water of the rest of China to supply Beijing – and it probably won’t work anyway,” said Dai Qing, a pro-democracy activist who was imprisoned during the run-up to the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 and who now focuses on water issues ….

Beijing, Dai said, should never have been developed as a major economic and industrial hub.

“We’ve been saying this for years: Beijing was just the political and cultural capital of China, and if the population were kept under 6 million, we wouldn’t have this problem,” she said. “But now there are too many vested political and real estate interests.”

“We have given up everything for the greater good of the country, but the party has been good to us too,” said Yao Ziliang, 74, sitting on the curb in front of the community center with many of the other old men. He said he was confident that the water diversion project would be a success.

“Of course it will bring water to Beijing,” he said. “The party would not lie to us.”

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Beijing, Dai Qing, Great Wall, Hubei, south-to-north water diversion project
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The first group of 499 villagers was moved Wednesday in central China’s Hubei province and a total of 60,000 people were to be relocated by Sept. 30, the official Xinhua News Agency said Thursday. The rest will be moved by 2014, it said.

The South-North Water Diversion Project will siphon water from the Yangtze River to serve drought-prone north China cities such as Beijing and Tianjin.

Danjiangkou city in Hubei is to eventually submerged under 170 yards (meters) of water, it said. Residents from the city’s Niuhelin district were the first batch to be moved out.

“I am surprised nobody cried when the coaches left our village. Last night, we felt sorrow when the whole village gathered to have our last dinner in our hometown together,” a villager surnamed Wang was quoted as saying.

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Post tags: Hubei, relocation, south-to-north water diversion project
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On June 23, the 58-year old Chen Yulian, wife of a Hubei provincial politics and law committee official, was mistaken for “a petitioner” and was badly beaten by plain-clothes policemen when she walked to the gate of the provincial party committee’s office buildings… The head of the local public securities bureau apologized to her stating, “It was a mistake; a complete mistake. We were not aware that we had beaten the wife of an important official.”

Shanghaiist has more details about the incident:

Chen Yulian, who is still in the hospital from her injuries a month ago, confirmed that police had apologized to her afterwards, saying they hadn’t known she was the wife of such an important official. “An official’s wife you can’t hit,” she spit out, “but a commoner you can?”

The original article appeared in forum posts all over the net. Chen Yulian had been going up to the offices to meet her husband, and was at the gate making a call on her cellphone when, lal of the sudden, six plainclothed men knocked her to the ground and began hitting and kicking her. Seeing stars, Mrs. Chen yelled that she was the family of the provincial cadre and could they please stop hitting her.

She later said that the six men continued to kick her down as she struggled to get up. One time, they kicked her upper body, slamming her head against the booth railing pole. Altogether, the beating lasted roughly 16 minutes.

Neighbors who saw the beating happened rushed up to defend her, telling the men that “she is from one of the provincial leader’s families, how can you play like this?” The six men told them to butt out. As more and more people came up with the same story, the men finally told them they could get the family to come prove it.

It was only after a half an hour that a car came to take the half-delirious Mrs. Chen to a security room, where she sat guarded by two policemen. And it was only after she woke up enough to call her husband, that her identity was confirmed and she was sent to a hospital.

See also a report from China Daily.

Update: Duihua translates a piece in Southern Daily by Zhou Hucheng which argues that this case show the need for reform in the petitioning system as a whole:

First, let’s look at what public security officials told family members: “It was a mistake—a simple mistake. They didn’t recognize you and didn’t know that you were the wife of such a high official.” A person at the scene asked them in retort: “You say the beating was a mistake and it’s not allowed to beat the wife of an official. Does that mean ordinary people can be beaten?” Looking at all of the rules governing [police] work that have been made public, the law does not authorize police to beat petitioners at will. Moreover, if it is legal for those possessing public authority to beat ordinary people as they wish, this would theoretically shake the foundation of our governance. However, in real life, instances of petitioners being beaten, locked up in psychiatric facilities, or even sent to re-education through labor are too numerous to count. Again, why is this?
It is primarily because of the pressure felt by local governments over petitioning quotas. Petitioning is linked to official performance, so that if there are many petitioners it is seen as meaning local society is unstable and officials bear responsibility for ineffective governance. If, on the other hand, there are few petitioners, it will be seen as effective construction of a harmonious society. When maintaining stability becomes such an extremely important—even the most important—job, one in which the quality of the work of [dealing with] petitions is closely linked to official performance, some places have even established a one-strike policy for petitioning, where even a single case of petitioning to higher authorities will result in officials from the petitioner’s locality being penalized with a warning or removal from office. Under such circumstances, the petitioning system has become a sharp sword hanging over the heads of local government officials, for whom the slightest mishandling [of a dispute] could have an impact on their personal futures and fates.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2010. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Hubei, local power, notable quotes, petitioners, police violence
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