Police disperse 2,000 anti-dam protesters in western China

"Now all the roads are cleared," a 30-year-old woman from the county of Suijiang, in China’s southwest Yunnan province, told the Wall Street Journal. "There are military police patrolling the streets to avoid people gathering together." After five days of heated protests — which had drawn 2,000 people to the streets — a tense silence was being enforced. On Tuesday, 400 paramilitiary officers had descended on tiny Sujiang to disperse demonstrators.

The villagers had gathered to protest government plans to build a major hydropower station on the nearby Jinsha River. Approximately 60,000 people are slated to be relocated by the dam, but many villagers either don’t qualify for government compensation — or feel that the amount offered is far too low to replace their lost livelihoods. 

Over the next decade, expect many more dams to be built in China, as the country seeks to meet rapidly growing energy needs. As Peter Bosshard wrote recently in FP, China’s National Energy Administration is likely to soon approve further hydropower projects totaling 140 gigawatts — in comparison, he notes, "the United States has installed just 80 gigawatts of hydropower capacity in its entire history."

Protests over land seizures and low compensation are not uncommon in rural China. (More than 50,000 such "public disturbances" are counted by public security bureaus each year.) But the recent Sujiang demonstration attracted particular national attention, in part because snapshots (see above) of paramilitary forces arriving in armoured personnel carriers were distributed widely through Sina Weibo — a popular Twitter-like microblogging site that remains accessible in China, for now.