Up the Yangtze

Last night I saw Up the Yangtze, an amazing film about China's Yangtze River. The "biggest engineering endeavour since the Great Wall, China has set out to harness the Yangtze with the world's largest mega-dam," the Three Gorges Dam. The film follows two young people who leave home to work on one of the river's cruise lines, Farewell Cruises, that caters to tourists who want to see the Yangtze before it is completely submerged once the dam is completed in 2010.

We watch as Yu Shui says goodbye to her family and starts a new life as a dishwasher on the cruise ship so that she can help to support her family and hopefully, earn enough money to attend high school. Meanwhile, Yu Shui's parents and younger siblings continue to live off the banks of the river. Their home, a shack surrounded by their small field of corn and other crops, is slowly being flooded by the rising water. This shack is their second home having already been pushed out of their first by the Three Gorges Dam project. Now they must leave again but this time they, like many other farmers from rural villages flooded by the dam, are being relocated to cities where they can no longer raise their own food. For many, the burden of buying food instead of growing it is more than they can afford.

There are many lessons and thoughts that I took away from this film. For one, it gave me another perspective about urban farming and its role in the changing face of China as millions of farmers become city dwellers. Will these farmers be forced to stop growing their own food altogether or will they continue to cultivate in the city as a new generation of Urban Farmers? And if so, what does the Chinese Urban Farm Cart look like?

A link to the film's website, http://www.uptheyangtze.com.