land Article What about the “Stayers”? Examining China’s Resettlement Induced by Large Reservoir Projects Tianhe Jiang 1,2,3, Mark Wang 2,4 , Yingnan Zhang 2,5, Guoqing Shi 1,3,* and Dengcai Yan 1,3 1 School of Public Administration, Hohai University, Nanjing 211100, China;
[email protected] (T.J.);
[email protected] (D.Y.) 2 School of Geography, The University of Melbourne, Carlton, VIC 3053, Australia;
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[email protected] (Y.Z.) 3 National Research Centre for Resettlement, Hohai University, Nanjing 210098, China 4 Centre for Contemporary Chinese Studies, Asia Institute, The University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC 3010, Australia 5 Key Laboratory of Regional Sustainable Development Modeling, Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China * Correspondence:
[email protected] Abstract: Large reservoir projects typically occupy vast lots of rural land and trigger resettlement on a massive scale. In China’s reservoir context, increasing concerns have arisen regarding distant- resettlees (those who are resettled outside the reservoir area), while fewer studies have examined the nearby-resettlees (those who are resettled near the original area) and the non-movers (those who do not resettle). The significance of these two groups has been downplayed and their populations are in the millions (or more) in China. How and why they are impacted is under-researched and their relative position and intergroup nexus with the distant-resettlees remains unclear in the existing literature. To address this research gap, this paper incorporates the differences between nearby- resettlees and non-movers and collectively refers to them as the “stayers” as they are left behind in Citation: Jiang, T.; Wang, M.; Zhang, reservoir areas.