第393页 The factory

It was particularly depressing because in a way the system worked well. It didn't necessarily make people happy, and it certainly wasn't fair, but it was extremely functional. The government was smart enough not to resettle all the dam refugees in one place, which could have been a political disaster; instead they scattered them in exit towns all along the expressway. And they created lots of little rules that distracted people from the larger issues. They measured square meters and they counted tress; they quantified the difference between brick and wood. It gave an air of legality and due process to the whole affair, when in  fact it was fundamentally flawed. There should have been public meetings about the dam; the press should have played a role; people should have been in a position to own the land they had famed for generations. New town like Shifan should have been located near industry, where people could find work. But these rarely the issued that came up in conversations, because locals were so obsessed with the minutiae.