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By Root 3913 0

not to resettle all the dam refugees in one place, which could have been a political disaster; instead they scattered them in exit towns all along the expressway. And they created lots of little rules that distracted people from the larger issues. They measured square meters and they counted trees; they quantified the difference between brick and wood. It gave an air of legality and due process to the whole affair, when in fact it was fundamentally flawed. There should have been public meetings about the dam; the press should have played a role; people should have been in a position to own the land they had farmed for generations. New towns like Shifan should have been located near industry, where people could find work. But these were rarely the issues that came up in conversations, because locals were so obsessed with the minutiae.

In the early stages of the project, there were demonstrations in Beishan. Locals told me that officials hired thugs to beat up a few organizers, and there were rumors that one man had been killed. In the end, the authorities were able to quell the unrest without much trouble. Such flare-ups are common in China—during the year that Beishan was demolished, the Ministry of Public Security reported 87,000 “public-order disturbances” nationwide. Every year, a similar statistic comes out of China, and it always seems staggering. But in fact the number of protests is irrelevant; all that matters is the target. If people were calling for the downfall of the Communist Party, or complaining about the fundamental structure of land-use laws, that might be a serious problem. But it’s a very different issue when somebody is upset because his home has been measured at 100 square meters instead of 150. In China, virtually all complaints occur at this level: they’re intensely local and individual. And it also matters who does the protesting. In rural areas, where the worst abuses occur, talented people tend to migrate. If a capable individual happens to stay behind, like Wei Ziqi in Sancha, there’s a good chance he ends up involved in the local power structure, perhaps as a Communist Party member. This is another way in which the system is functional: there are plenty of pressure valves to redirect the energies of potentially dangerous people.

For the most part, capable Chinese have learned that there’s no point in overt political activity, but this doesn’t mean they’re powerless. The degree of social mobility is higher than in most developing countries, and talent and hard work usually pay off—this is clear from the experience of people like Master Luo. But such folks rely on the government for virtually nothing. They find agency elsewhere: they pay for private training courses; they learn to use guanxi; they switch jobs on their own. They negotiate hard with bosses, using any advantage they can find. If they’re relocated to a dead community, they simply leave. With so many options and so much movement, it doesn’t make sense to get involved in a doomed battle against the cadres.

In Shifan, most petitioners I met seemed desperate. They tended to be less educated than the average resident, with worse job prospects, and often they had had poor luck as migrants. Many of them had been traumatized—during the course of protesting, they had been threatened in some manner. All of these factors made it even less likely that they would succeed, but they kept trying, because they had been pushed beyond the pale. And only once did I meet a protestor who impressed me as highly competent. He arranged a meeting carefully, through a mutual acquaintance, and the first thing he did was ask to see my government-issued journalist license. Nobody in an exit town had ever done that before.

“To be honest, I would prefer to talk with somebody else,” he said. “I really want to speak with the Columbia Broadcasting System or the British Broadcasting Corporation.”

I respected that—he wanted TV time, not some lousy print journalist. But on that day I was the only option at hand, so we chatted for an hour. He complained that nobody