ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the evolution of the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) laws and practices in the area of development-caused forced displacement and resettlement (DFDR), in order to inform and to share lessons with researchers from other countries, and also compares the evolutions and commonalities between the World Bank’s and the PRC’s policies over time. During the first three decades of the PRC’s existence (1949–1980), its approach to DFDR followed an inadequate paradigm that gave one-sided priority to building up the projects’ physical technology while neglecting people’s welfare and impoverishing one-third of the displaced populations. However, after the Cultural Revolution’s end, the errors of the prior decades were openly recognized. During the 1980s, China began to change its model and methodology for DFDR by making progressive reforms to its land laws and resettlement policies. Also in 1980, China joined the World Bank, enabling it to learn from the Bank’s pioneering international policy and experiences on DFDR. In China, the Bank’s 1980 resettlement policy was applied for the first time in the Shuikou Dam project, with great success. During the succeeding 10 years the World Bank made improvements to its DFDR policy in three stages (World Bank 1986, 1988, 1990), China also emulated the lessons reflected in these improvements.
During 1990–2015, China engaged in a systematic process to craft a new resettlement paradigm, which gradually became more protective and development- oriented than the World Bank’s policy. This chapter documents how China adopted new legal steps to mandate social impact assessments (SIA) in all infrastructure projects, to reduce the risks to displaced people, and to provide increased investment financing for economic development after relocation. China is now pioneering new theoretical principles and rules for compensation, elimination of externalities, and early detection of political stability risks, and it is investing huge 144sums for the retroactive correction of displacement’s legacies of impoverishment. Cumulatively, the PRC’s legislated improvements have evolved into a new Chinese paradigm defined as resettlement with development, characterized by the pursuit of higher norms for all key components of reconstruction and improved livelihoods. China’s new paradigm significantly surpasses the protections provided by the Bank’s resettlement policy OP/BP 4.12, which in 2016 was replaced with the even weaker standards for displacement and resettlement processes contained in the World Bank’s recently published ESF/ESS. These new standards were supported by some governments but also broadly critiqued in an international debate among civil society organizations and NGOs, as well as by experienced scholars and researchers.
