China has relocated 2.22 million residents from flood-prone areas in the Yangtze River valley during the past decade at a cost of 38.8 billion yuan.
Lawmakers attending the annual session of the country's top legislature said the figure includes about 600,000 residents relocated to safe regions from areas around Lake Poyang in Jiangxi Province since the catastrophic flooding in 1998, and 418,000 residents relocated for the ongoing Three Gorges Dam project areas.
China decided to invest 10.1 billion yuan in projects shortly after the 1998 flooding building towns for over 2.45 million residents in the provinces of Hubei, Hunan, Jiangxi and Anhui along the middle and lower reaches of the river.
The projects are expected to be completed this year, and the remaining 650,000 residents from the four provinces will move to new towns built for them.
China launched the dam project in 1993 to curb the flooding along the flood-prone middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River, the country's longest.
A total of 1.13 million residents are expected to leave their homes that will be submerged by the reservoir water, and most of them will resettle in areas near the planned reservoir areas, while the remaining will relocate elsewhere.
The 600 km long reservoir snakes through Hubei Province and rural parts of Chongqing Municipality.
(Xinhua News Agency March 14, 2002)
