China's Energy Rush Shatters Village

Of the 200 houses that make up Da Antou, about half were cracked and more than a dozen had been declared unfit to live in by 2005, according to the village Communist Party secretary, Wang Xiaohui, and other residents.

"Now even the clinic is getting dangerous," said Li, the paramedic, as he pointed at cracks zigzagging down the wall.

The unsettled earth has destroyed not only walls but also the water system in Da Antou, forcing farmers and their wives to haul water from a communal pipe installed in the village square. Men and women gathered Monday afternoon with plastic buckets and, balancing two on either end of their yokelike shoulder poles, carried away what their family needed. Even the communal pipe, they complained, sometimes goes dry.

Chen Xiao'e, 41, said she waited alone on the roof until dawn after being awakened by the shattering windows that night when her home first began to sink. When light came, she sought out Wang, the party secretary, for advice on what to do. It was the mines under Kele Mountain, he told her; she should go to the mining company for compensation.

Since then, Wang said, the Sihe company has halted operations and given a total of $346,660 in three payments, in 2004, 2005 and 2006, to compensate the villagers for damage to their homes. So far, most expenditures have been rent subsidies for those forced to evacuate, he said. Small families get $40 a month, and large families, with four or more to house, get $95, he explained.

More than $100,000 has been set aside to help villagers pay for new homes that are under construction in the nearly town of Runchen, Wang said. For most of them, their traditional life atop Kele Mountain has been written off, he said, and from now on they will have to commute to their fields. In any case, farmers here said, many of their terraced fields have been left unworkable because of sinkholes.

Despite the plans for relocation in Runchen, villagers complain that they are not getting properly compensated. What they want, they explained, is cash in hand for the value of the homes they can no longer live in.

"We want somebody to pay attention to this," said Wang Guozheng, 67, whose three-family home sits empty and forlorn with cracks yawning in almost every room.

Wang Xiaohui, the party secretary, said the villagers have vastly overestimated the value of their homes. The true market value was set by a team of experts sent out last year by the county government, he said, and by the time the villagers pay for new homes in Runchen, the compensation money by and large will have run out.

"Don't believe everything those villagers say," he advised.