Country Driving [193]
“He can, too!” Cheng said.
“No he can’t!” The man swung his fist again: no reaction. “See, I told you!”
No mother likes to see her child maligned, and Cheng quickly came to the defense. She jabbed her chopsticks within an inch of the baby’s face—at last he blinked. “See!” she said triumphantly. “His eyes are good!”
“But he doesn’t see this!”
“Yes, he does!”
“Watch this—he won’t react.”
“He does, too! You just have to do it like this!”
“Actually, I’m getting a little hot,” I said. “Do you think we could leave now?”
On our way out, the owner gave us fifty yuan in coupons, by way of apology. “I won’t go back there,” Master Luo said, once we were out on Suisong Road. “The food’s terrible.” But he carefully folded the coupons and put them in his pocket. Outside, the air was cooler, and the baby stopped sweating. His eyes remained unblinking, calm as ever, ready for anything the next fifty days might throw at him.
WHENEVER I FOLLOWED THE expressway from Wenzhou to Lishui, I stopped in small towns along the way. A number of them had been planned in conjunction with the highway: at every exit, new neighborhoods were being built, and sometimes a whole settlement appeared in what had formerly been farmland. One of the exit towns was called Shifan, and it was located about ten miles south of Lishui. I first visited Shifan before the expressway had even opened, when the town was still a construction site full of unfinished streets and scaffolded apartment blocks. A billboard stood at the head of the main street:
CHERISH THE TANKENG DAM,
SERVE THE PEOPLE WHO WILL BE RELOCATED HERE
THE FIRST STAGE OF MOVING WILL BEGIN IN:
32 DAYS
The sign had tear-away numbers, and sheets of paper from previous days still lay on the ground beneath the billboard. There was a 5 here, a 4 there, a crumbled 3 nearby: countdown to a new community. When I wandered down the main street, a man carrying a hammer approached me. “Are you here to buy an apartment?” he said. I told him no, I was a journalist on my way to Lishui. “Oh, you’re a journalist,” he said. “Are you looking for people who are unhappy about the dam?”
Those were the first two things I was offered in Shifan: empty apartments and unhappy people. I learned that it was one of a number of exit towns that were being built because of a hydroelectric project called the Tankeng Dam. The dam is located on the Xiao River, high in the mountains west of Lishui; construction will require five years of work and a total investment of over six hundred million dollars. Upon completion, the new reservoir will submerge ten towns and eighty villages, and over fifty thousand people must be relocated. All of these facts were printed on information billboards near the construction site, but apart from that it was hard to learn much about the Tankeng Dam. Few articles about the project had appeared in Zhejiang newspapers, and not one word had been published in the foreign press. The most remarkable thing about the Tankeng Dam was that fifty thousand people could be displaced in virtual silence, at least as far as the media was concerned.
Chinese dams are so common that they often don’t receive much attention, and domestic media is typically prevented from criticizing such projects. With air pollution an increasing concern, the government needs alternatives to coal-burning power plants, and hydroelectric is often the first option. This is especially true in a place like Lishui, which has high mountains, plenty of rainfall, and dreams of becoming a major industrial center. The region is already famous for its dam-building, and local electrical needs are only going to increase. In the development zone, a government official told me that industry currently accounted for 70 percent of Lishui’s total consumption of electricity. This statistic was for the whole administrative region, which includes