ABSTRACT
The Three Gorges Project has the greatest scale among all dam projects in the world, and the Three Gorges resettlers have become the world's largest resettlement population. There is a difference between the Three Gorges resettlement and the ecological relocation in Ningxia: the Three Gorges resettlers were not displaced to defuse the ecological dilemma, but in order to meet the economic development needs of the country. The key problem in the Three Gorges relocation was that the area had insufficient land resources for local relocation. Yet another problem was soil erosion. The three major factors which restrict the development of China's rural areas—a large population, the shortage of resources per capita, and a fragile ecological environment—had been very prominent in the Three Gorges reservoir rural area. One of the principles in the relocation compensation plan was that the payment was calculated based on the original values, standards and scales.
