One
On May 13, 2021, General Secretary Xi Jinping said to the migrants in the new village of Jiuchong Town, Huaichuan County, Henan Province, to the migrants of the South-north Water Diversion Project: "We used to be that home, it is not easy to leave, I heard that 'there are mountains and water, there are fields and forests', and some have boats, right? In order for the people along the route to be able to drink good water, everyone gave up their small homes for everyone and moved out. It's a great dedication. The people along the route and the people of the whole country should thank you, the grace of dripping water gushes out of the spring to repay each other, and the draught water does not forget the well diggers, you are the well diggers. ”
I am a migrant from the South-to-North Water Diversion Reservoir, and the old house where I lived was demolished twice as the project progressed.
More than 7 years ago, my home was in the old county town of Huaichuan County in the southwest corner of Henan Province, which was originally called "Chengguan" and now called "Old Town". This beautiful little town has Wenxing Temple, Mars Temple, Kuixing Tower, Huangxue, Doll Bridge... Listen to these names to figure out how beautiful she is.
The small city is less than a square kilometer in circumference, my family lives in Dongguan, and a main street leads to Xiguan. Outside Xiguan is a large pier, bustling with people, lined with trees, and a large river bypasses the west of the city and flows through the south of the city. Grandma's house is on the other side of the river in the first village of the first courtyard, four or five miles from Xiguan. When there is a flood in these four or five miles, it is the riverbed, and when the river is small, it is a river beach, and you can drive away. I herd sheep on the beach, bathe in the river, nagisa clear sand white, fish and birds fly, always in the bottom of my heart.
This river is called Danjiang.
In the summer of 1971, I finished the first grade at Mars Temple Elementary School, and every family in the small city moved away. The reason for the relocation was that the adults said that "the water is coming up, and the city is going to be flooded." In the summer of 2008, when I stood on the site of the old city, more than thirty years had passed. The streets, pavilions, walls, and my elementary school were already an endless cornfield, ready to meet the rising river. At the end of March 2018, my mother was seriously ill and I returned to Huaichuan. Uncle Jiandu, who was the director of the county hospital, took me to the old city to see the water. By this time, the river was already a vast ocean, and the old city had completely sunk to the bottom. A few days later, my mother died. I knew that no one bothered to talk about the old city, about the river beach, about the time before the relocation, and could only search silently in my memory.
When I moved in 1971, my family did not move to another county, but leaned back to the first production team of the Zhangying Brigade of Shangji Commune in Huaichuan County, dozens of miles away. It is a large village that lives along the river. The river in the west is called the "Stork River", which flows south for dozens of miles, and then merges with the Danjiang River and flows into the Danjiangkou Reservoir, a large reservoir of Yihe and Lake.
In Zhangying, I lived for 3 years, swam in the Stork River, picked up the ground lotus on the LongquanGuan Mountain, went to early school with my friends, sat on the wheat field on the summer night and listened to the stories of my fellow villagers... Time has filtered out the bitterness and barrenness, and all that remains in the memory is goodness.
40 years later, as the Dam of the Danjiangkou Reservoir rises and the water storage increases, Zhangying Village will also be submerged, and people here will either move to the "Xinzhangying" in Changge City, Xuchang, or to a new community built at the foot of a higher mountain nearby. By 2014, Zhangying Village, where I lived between the ages of 8 and 11, had also become a riverbed and sunk to the bottom of the reservoir.
Two
In late October 1952, Comrade Mao Zedong visited Henan for the first time since the founding of New China. On the 31st, standing at the top of mount Yaoshan, overlooking the Yellow River at his feet, he seemed to have made a silent dialogue and consultation with nature on rearranging the landscape and water of the new country, and then cautiously and clearly made a prophecy, putting forward a concept: "There is more water in the south and less water in the north, if possible, it is also possible to borrow some water." Since then, the south-to-north water diversion has become the original intention of the Chinese Communists to balance the country's water resources and solve basic livelihood problems. After long-term demonstration, planning and experimentation, the central government will gradually lay out and implement the overall project of the South-to-North Water Diversion Project in the middle, east and west. The central line project diverts water from the Danjiangkou Reservoir at the junction of Henan and Hubei to the north, passes through more than a dozen cities in Henan and Hebei, and connects to the water networks of Beijing and Tianjin respectively, solving the difficulties of tens of millions of residents along the line in drinking water, ecological water replenishment, and industrial water use. The Danjiangkou Reservoir Dam is in Danjiangkou City, Hubei Province, and most of the submerged area is in the territory of Huaichuan County, Henan Province, and the first sluice gate of the canal is in Taocha Village, Jiuchong Town, Huaichuan County.
On September 1, 1958, the construction of the Danjiangkou dam project officially began. Yu'e's 100,000 dam-building army fought hard for nine years, and in November 1967, the Danjiangkou Reservoir Dam stored water under the dam. In the decades that followed, the dam was raised several times and the inundation area gradually expanded. In order to free up the storage capacity, Under the guidance and coordination of the central government, Huaichuan County, Henan Province, where the main submerged area is located, has been relocated seven times in the past 50 years, and more than 400,000 people have moved away from their homeland. The last time was after 2009, when a total of 165,400 people relocated to water-receiving cities in Henan Province over two years. In the process of mobilizing and organizing the relocation of the masses, 12 cadres in Huaichuan County have sacrificed themselves in the front line of work. On December 12, 2014, the first phase of the South-to-North Water Diversion Project was officially opened.
As of May 10, 2021, in the past six and a half years, the South-to-North Water Diversion Project has supplied nearly 38 billion cubic meters of water to the north, stabilizing the water quality of more than 130 counties in 24 large and medium-sized cities along the route at Class II and above, and directly benefiting 69 million people. Among them, the water supply to Beijing is more than 6.4 billion cubic meters, 74% of the urban water in Beijing comes from my hometown, and the city directly benefits more than 13 million people. The South-to-North Water Diversion project has fundamentally changed the pattern of water supply in the water-receiving areas, and even lifted the potential crisis that the capital may be relocated due to water shortages.
South-to-north water diversion through the Yangtze River, Huaihe River, Yellow River, Haihe river four major water systems, the cumulative ecological replenishment of more than 5 billion cubic meters, soon so that the decline in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region groundwater level rebounded, as of now, the city's plain area groundwater level has been cumulatively rebounded 3.72 meters, increased reserves of 1.9 billion cubic meters, Miyun, Huairou, Daning, Ming Tombs and other large and medium-sized reservoirs because of the south water replenishment, water storage has also reached a historical high. The South-to-North Water Diversion Project has become a well-deserved ecological project.
Three
In May 2012, the Cyberspace Administration of China organized an interview on the theme of "walking and changing" for online media. I took the initiative to ask for help, led several cadres and reporters from the Beijing Municipal Cyberspace Administration, China Economic Network, and Sina Network to Zhengzhou, Henan Province, and after meeting with the reporters of the central news website in Henan and the reporters of the local news website in Henan, I first did training in Zhengzhou, and then collectively interviewed the new immigrant village in Guangwu Town, Xingyang, the construction site of the Yellow Tunnel, the Lushan Shahe Aqueduct, the Huaichuan Ecological Water Protection Project, and the Head of the Canal on the Central Line, which lasted for a week.
As a former immigrant from the reservoir area and a citizen of Beijing today, I am both a contributor and a beneficiary, a witness and a witness. In those days of intense interviews, facing a great cause that lasted for 60 years and spanning generations so deeply, so truly understanding one of the largest water conservancy projects in the contemporary world, and feeling the joys and sorrows of various groups of people so three-dimensionally, I was constantly shaken, moved, and inspired. At that time, he wrote a small poem "Closer, Closer - Written in the Online Media South-to-North Water Diversion and Transformation Activity", and when sharing it with the interview group, many comrades shed tears.
For several years, I have been following every progress, tracking every piece of information, and thinking about these questions:
If it is not a political party that sincerely seeks happiness for the people and rejuvenation for the nation, how can it carry such a heavy mission and such a difficult task on its shoulders from generation to generation?
If it were not for a group of party members and cadres who shared the same desires from top to bottom, were strictly disciplined, were loyal to their duties, and were not afraid of sacrifice, how could they do ideological work among immigrants who were difficult to leave their ancestral homeland and were unwilling to give up every brick and tile? How can the people who have been relocated be persuaded to give up their land, resettle the migrants, and help them get rich?
If it is not a stable development, harmonious symbiosis, and a promising governance system and living environment, how can hundreds of thousands of ordinary people bid farewell to their homeland, integrate into other places, and start a new life?
Fortunately, Today's China has it all.
Although I can no longer see the streets, houses, villages, and schools where I lived in my childhood and adolescence, I often hear the sighs of relatives who have emigrated to their new lives, often receive messages that the mountain city has become more beautiful, more convenient and more open with the progress of the times, and update the data that the water from the south has brought to the social life and ecological construction of Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei. I am pleased with the good days of the immigrants, and I am also glad that a canal of clear water can bring so much change to the country.
Bless you, my hometown!
Bless you, my folks!
(The author is the president of China Entrepreneur Magazine)