Just got a roll of film back from the lab of photos I shot back in October on a trip through Three Gorges area of Chongqing and Hubei Provice. I stopped off in Fengjie, one of the cities flooded and then rebuilt higher up the hillside. The huge displacement of over a million people formed the backdrop for two films from several years back that I enjoyed; the documentary Manufactured Landscapes, following Edward Burtynsky’s photographic trips to the area, and then Jia Zhang Ke’s fictional Still Life (San Xia Hao Ren), so naturally I’d always been interested in exploring the region myself. What I found was a bustling new city much like any other in China, since most cities in China are mostly new. I realised that a massive displacement of people was going to happen anyway, dam or no dam. As the motorways began to snake their way in from Yichang and Chongqing cities, bringing with them the 21st century, the buildings of old run-down Fengjie would likely have been demolished and rebuilt in the name of progress, and profit. Rural families were going to move off their land to the cities, become migrant workers, and suffer cultural upheaval, dislocation and instability anyway even if that land was still fertile and not now underwater. That isn’t to say the project hasn’t still been controversial, with many historical sites being flooded, but I think the magnitude of the population displacement has to be seen in the wider context of massive social upheaval and economic changes in China. I think in the West we might tend to see it in terms of flooding a million farmers off their land in a Western country and think “how could that be possible ?”. Of course it wouldn’t be possible in the West, but it was possible here in China, and not just because of an authoritarian government. October 2015, Fuji GS645
