just watched a Three Gorges documentary at Wheeler. i'm probably repeating myself, but just really appreciate how documentaries often bring the lives of ppl in obscure places to the outside world... i went for this 2.5 hr-long screening mainly cos i'm doing a case study on Chongqing now and recently found out that one of the government's big challenge was to relocate the residents living around the dam area... and i came across provincial publications that said things like... this year we successfully relocated this many folks.... but in reality, as the documentary shows, there's so much more to it. when HUGE national construction projects like this get implemented, yeah, it's good for the economy, it provides hydroelectric power... but at the same time so many ppl are literally FORCED out of their homes... so many lives get disrupted... notices with seemingly arbitrary deadlines for evacuation are just put up on doors, walls etc and residents are expected to be able to relocate themselves (there's also like compensations etc but like everything seems rather confusing and poorly managed and many ppl get left out etc). to force ppl to evacuate by a certain date, electricity and water supplies eventually get cut off and the film shows these probably dangerous and unprofessional ways of doing it- ppl literally sawing off pipes and sticking pieces of wood into them to stop the flow; after demolition of buildings workers try to get some cash for scrap metal/ bricks or something and the ways they went about doing it just made me really fear for their safety...

i dunno, actually seeing what it might be like for myself kinda puts everything into perspective. 'extrapolating' this to my own research topic--i can read all the academic papers in the world, look at all my primary sources; but not having witnessed things actually going on at the ground level just impairs my overall understanding... it made me rethink what i've been doing. i wonder what all the statistics i have for urban-rural income inequality translates into in reality... what does it mean to have an annual income of 2500 yuan? sadly i wun hav the time nor opportunity to find out before i turn in my thesis. but it made me realize what REAL research really entails.