Li Antian, head of Yangtze River Water Resources Committee, said, "It is the world's largest disaster-victim migration program, as well as the world's largest program for improving subsistence conditions and ecological environment."

He said the migrants are mainly from the provinces of Hubei, Hunan, Jiangxi and Anhui which are located at middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River.

The official added that the provinces have drafted plans to move an additional 2 million people residing in the bottomlands along the river to nearby highlands over the next two years.

The Yangtze River floods had constantly threatened the life and property of people in those four provinces, especially those whose houses were built on small river islets.

The Chinese government has allocated a total of 5.7 billion yuan ( US$686 million) to the building of new houses for the migrants in the past two years.

At the same time, the government has also cleared the river islets residing places and turned lake-reclaimed farmlands into lakes again, in a bid to let the floods pass smoothly.

After the completion of the program, over 10 billion cubic meters of floodwater storage capacity is expected to be added to the Yangtze River, which will help greatly ease the flooding of the river.

Wen Fubo, academician with the Chinese Academy of Engineering and expert in flood prevention, pointed out that the major cause of the Yangtze floods is due to local farmers recklessly reclaiming land from lakes and the occupation of flood sluicing routes.

He believes that the migration program is the most important measure for solving this major problem. The program will fundamentally coordinate relations between human beings and nature and enable sound development of the ecological environment and sustainable development of the Yangtze River basin.

The program of strategic importance has witnessed achievements. The submerging of 337 bottomland areas where people lived, a part of the program, had greatly lowered the river's floodwater level of the 1999 flood, similar to the ferocious flood of 1998, and greatly reduced the flood prevention expenditure.

Statistics indicated that the direct economic losses of 1999 Yangtze River flood only accounted for around one-fourth of the catastrophic flood in 1998.

To guarantee the safety of China's largest river -- Yangtze, China will put in 4.2 billion yuan (US$506 million) to reinforce major parts of the river dikes within three years.

The World Bank also decided to offer US$210 million to help build a digital model system of the Yangtze River for flood prevention.

With all of the efforts, China is expected to complete the building of an overall and sound Yangtze River flood prevention system by 2010.

The flood victims all welcomed the migration program which could possibly present them with more ways to make money where they now live.

Xu Songshun, a 39-year-old farmer who had lived on a river islet near Wuhan of central China's Hubei Province for 10 years, was among the first group of local farmers to apply for migration. He moved to a newly built migration village five kilometers away.

Xu rebuilt his house four times during his 10 years of living on the river islet because it was swept away by floods four times.

At that time, his home had two shabby cabinets, a bicycle by the bed, cooking utensils and a cloth wrapper for taking "property" away when fleeing from floods.

Similar to many other migrants, Xu grows crops in his contracted farmland at the river islet before the farmland gives way to floodwaters. He also opened a building material shop near his new house.

Migrants can raise fish after the reclaimed land becomes lakes or engage in other industries.

Xu, together with his wife and two sons, is living in a 200-square-meter two-story house, which is equipped with cable television, telephone and a tapped water pipe.

"We are now living a stable and promising new life," he said.

(People's Daily 09/30/2000)