1 online resource (1 streaming video file (78 min.))
Contents
Introduction to Yunnan -- The Nu River -- The Great Leap Forward -- Will dams end poverty? -- Man must conquer nature -- Tiger Leaping Gorge -- Farmers organize -- New rights, new voices -- A village rises -- Signs of change
Summary
Explores through the eyes of activists, farmers, and journalists an extraordinary campaign to stop a dam project on the upper Yangtze River in southern China. Features archival footage, and includes interviews with a government insider and witnesses who discuss Chairman Mao's campaigns to conquer nature in the name of progress and the environmental destruction of the previous era. Highlights as an environmental movement takes root when a new environmental law is passed, for the first time in China's history, ordinary citizens have the democratic right to speak out and take part in government decisions. Follows as farmers from Xiaoshaba village along the Nu River Valley travel to villages along the Mekong River, which has already been flooded from the Manwan Dam; when they witness the poverty resulting from relocation, the farmers of the Nu River Valley realize they must protest the building of the dams on the Nu River. In the village of Shangri-la, villagers mobilized to protest the building of the dam at Tiger Leaping Gorge, on the upper Yangtze River, one of the largest proposed dams, they succeed in suspending the project. Follows as activists test their freedom to challenge a dam and the environmental movement they trigger could transform China
Notes
Converted with permission from DVD videodisc to streaming video format, July 22, 2014