Mekong Diaries: Day 24

Day 24

Today we are on motorbike. We leave early and head towards the Jinghong dam’s reservoir. Not long on the road we pull in at another community rubber factory. We spent some time photographing the process of preparing the raw resin for shipment to a larger factory for the final manufacturing of tires, erasers or something else.

The roads soon left the narrow lands of villages and trees and entered into the wide flat plains typified by the courses of a great river. Here farmland spread in every direction, with many clearing fires burning at the end of the harvest. The road surface also soon worsened until we were bumping merrily along on gravel and mud. 25 kms later we reached a village relocated by the damming of the Mekong.

Below the valley was flooded, the water lapping up to the point where two ridges met in a fold. Our first action was to drive on as far as the increasingly muddy and pot-holed road allowed. After taking a turning a few more corners the road disappeared into the widening face of the reservoir. We turned back to try and arrange a boat trip.

At the village a young man agreed to take us out for an exorbitant fee. We spent perhaps one hour motoring down the length of the flooded valley, until we reached the river’s mainstream. There in both directions the reservoir spread to about a few hundred meters wide, while rubber plantations lined the hills. There was not much to see. If you have visited many dam reservoirs you will understand why tourism plans built on dams invariably end in deserted car parks and faded plastic furniture.

Returning to the village that was moved as one to make way for the water catchment we spoke briefly with the locals. They expressed a concern that some of the compensation was not coming as promised, but asked where they preferred to live the said their new larger homes, with TV and electricity please. As we talked a couple of men walked from the village across a suspended footbridge next to the village to the rubber plantations lining the hill on the other side of the valley. The land however is officially a National Forest Reserve, one of the last remaining patches of forest in a region once famous for its huge jungles, complete with elephants and tigers. But the villagers here  are taking the land opposite their town as in the overpopulated nation of China no one is making more land.

One of the younger men we talked to expressed a regret that the old home and places of his childhood was lost to the waters. But while the’ old house was fun, the new house was better’. They reiterated that the provincial government and the company had paid back only a proportion of the compensation due them, and that they had lost land, but in China they said if it is the government, there is nothing you can do, they said.

We head to a nearby village to spend the night. Dinner is accompanied by rice wine, and we find ourselves becoming rapidly inebriated and in deep conversation with an elderly man in the village. We learn that, as a child the village was small, only 10 or more families. He remembers the jungles and hunting the rich wildlife that used to thrive in the region. Even then they felt the power of the Central Chinese Authorities, with Han Chinese students and teachers being sent out into every village to oversee the revolution’s plans. The turning point for their lives came in 1984 when the policy of communality was ended, and people were allowed to begin individual farms again. He answered our questions warmly and happily until we asked about earlier times when his demeanor changed. The experiences of the old China clearly sit close to the surface of people’s minds, and the fear of being persecuted for mentioning it is just as self-evident in their sudden silences and meaningful stares. But when we asked him to compare these time, of rubber and development with earlier time his answer was unambiguous:
“In all of history this is a good time for the Dai. They have lost something, but gained something else. They lose the forest, but they don’t really mind. They cut it down themselves to plant more rubber.”