Program in Barren Region of China Offers Villagers Chance to Start Over Elsewhere : Asia: Voluntary relocation program is largest in history and could eventually encompass 5 million in poor province.

For the people in this poor village, there are two choices:

Wait hopelessly for rain to drench the barren hills and bring the fields to life, or abandon their hardscrabble ancestral home in north-central China and move--in some cases hundreds of miles--to one of the government relocation settlements irrigated by the Yellow River.

Since 1982, more than 250,000 inhabitants of Ningxia province, wedged between treeless mountains and desert south of Inner Mongolia and one of China’s poorest regions, have chosen to move to the resettlement areas. The World Bank has called the voluntary resettlement project one of the most successful of its kind in the world.

Buoyed by the project’s success, the leaders of Ningxia, home to one of the largest concentrations of Muslims in China, announced an even more ambitious plan last year to move an additional 450,000 poor dry-land farmers to irrigated areas over the next 10 years.

The proposed project eventually would involve moving 15% of the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region’s 5 million people.

“It is the biggest voluntary movement of people in history,” said Hu Baoju, deputy director of the Ningxia Agricultural Construction Ministry overseeing the project.

The distinction between “voluntary” and “involuntary” is important because of the massive, controversial Three Gorges Dam project on the Yangtze River that involves the forced movement of more than 1.2 million people from their homes to higher ground. International human rights organizations have strongly criticized that project.

So many people have volunteered for the Ningxia resettlement program that the government now has a problem with squatters jumping the gun and moving to land near the irrigated zones. “More people are coming than they can take,” said Zou Youlan, a World Bank resettlement specialist.

Critics contend that the Yellow River water quota allotted the region is not enough to support the huge population proposed in the ambitious government resettlement plan.

“I think they have water for a maximum of 250,000 more people,” a World bank official said. Foreign skepticism about the Yellow River’s capacity will likely make funds from the new World Bank and elsewhere difficult to obtain.

The project is still far short of the estimated $365 million that officials here say is needed to move the dry-land farmers and build basic homes and schools for their children. To help save money, the government has come up with a plan requiring the new settlers to contribute their own labor to building the irrigation canals and other infrastructure.

Some government officials are also concerned that, because half of the potential settlers are Muslim, the new settlements could become hotbeds of Islamic fervor that in the past have sometimes proved hostile to Beijing.

But to Ma Zijin, 35, who lives with his wife and four children in a cave here in Wudaoling village, none of these issues matter. He’s ready to make the move, the sooner the better.

Ma, who is illiterate and partly blind, said he made the equivalent of $25 last year. His only holdings are two cows, several acres of useless, desiccated farmland and the cave where he lives. The cave has no electricity; the only light at night comes from a small oil lamp. None of his four children, ranging in age from 7 to 12, has ever spent a day in school.

Like the other villagers here, Ma survives on government handouts, including drinking water hauled to the village by truck, and from money earned selling desert herbs and what the villagers call “dragon bones.” The partly fossilized animal bones are ground up and used as a remedy for infertility.

Wudaoling has already been designated by the government as one of the villages to be relocated in irrigated areas. Ma and most of the other villagers have visited the resettlement site, about 50 miles away near Tongxin, the county seat.

But Ma has been told that the land is full. “We would like to move to the irrigated land,” he said, “but right now, there are no places.”

Many of those families who have moved say they are happy in their new homes.

Ma Ziwen, 50, was one of the 300 people lucky enough to move from Wudaoling to a new settlement about 50 miles away to which water from the Yellow River is pumped to irrigate the fields. Last year, he built a larger home to replace the small mud hut where his family of seven stayed when they first moved to the new settlement five years years ago.

Planting wheat on 1.6 acres of irrigated land and selling vegetables and fruit from his small home garden, Ma Ziwen and his family earned the equivalent of $1,200 last year, many times the annual income of those left behind in the old village.

The farmer owns a small tractor that cost him $450 and two chickens.

The extra income has produced an important change in the household. For generations, family members have been illiterate, unable to read either the Chinese they speak or the Arabic of their faith.

None of his six children can read or write. But two grandsons have begun elementary school this year.