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 Is China's Three Gorges Dam Unstoppable? by Rick Montgomery
published in The Georgia Straights Vancouver BC's weekly news and entertainment magazine
"The Three Gorges Dam is the greatest public-works project in China since the Great Wall," declared Zhang Ying, a 23-year-old tour guide employed by China's International Travel Service. "The dam will help China take its place as one of the world's great powers," she added.
Standing on a viewing platform 300 metres above this monstrous construction site on China's Yangtze River, I studied the towering walls of the new dam, walls that environmentalists claim may destroy a river system vital to the livelihood of one in 12 people in the world.
I turned from the dam to look upstream at the fabled 1,200-metre peaks of the Three Gorges, a winding, mountainous chasm that separates the low-lying floodplains of eastern China from the mountainous hinterland of China's wild west.
"These gorges are as famous in China as the Grand Canyon is in North America," said Zhang.
She directed my attention to the Yangtze, Asia's longest river, which flowed around the dam site below through a diversion canal. Engorged by recent rains, the Yangtze, a torrent of brown sediment, brought to mind a wild animal trying to break out of its cage.
"Thousands of people died this year from the flooding of the Yangtze," Zhang reported gravely. "The reservoir created by this dam will save lives."
I shared with Zhang comments made earlier this year by Lu Qinkan, a retired Chinese government hydrologist and flood-prevention expert. Lu maintained that the money earmarked for the dam's construction would be better spent on repairing the main dikes downstream, which he said are in a state of disrepair.
Citing data collected during the great floods of 1954, Lu asserted that the reservoir created behind the Three Gorges Dam will only be able to absorb a fraction of the 5,550-kilometre-long Yangtze's annual flooding. Furthermore, the needs of a dam built for power (high water level for hydroelectric production) conflict with the needs of one built solely for flood control (low water level for maximum flood absorption).
I also relayed to Zhang the opinion of John Pomfret, Beijing bureau chief for the Washington Post. "Most of the flooding this year came from tributaries and rainfall below the dam, he had told me several nights earlier over a fiery Sichuan dinner. "There will still be floods even after the Three Gorges Dam is finished."
Zhang looked annoyed. "China needs power for development," she snapped. "The Three Gorges Dam will provide a clean source of energy."
I nodded my head reluctantly, glancing at the polluted haze hanging over the Yangtze as far as the eye could see. Few who have visited China recently would argue that this country's overreliance on coal as a power source is not one of its greatest environmental challenges. The burning of sulphur-laden powder coal (of which China has a seemingly unlimited supply) helps make pulmonary disease the number-one cause of death in China. According to official government statistics, the power generated by the Three Gorges Dam (18,200 megawatts‹twice as much as Brazil and Paraguay's Itaipu Dam, presently the largest dam in the world) will be equivalent to that of 50 million tons of coal in a year.
Claiming that hydro power may be China's best alternative to the burning of coal, many hydrologists‹including a team of American scientific consultants hired by China in the late 1980's have made formal recommendations that China build a series of smaller dams on the Yangtze.
"There are a lot of opinions," Zhang quipped, sweeping her hands through the air. "But as you can see, the dam can¹t be stopped now."
I took one last look at the construction site before Zhang led me back down the hill. She was right; despite continuing efforts of environmentalists, human-rights activists, and foreign governments all over the world, the Three Gorges Dam is beyond the point of no return. Over a year ago, the Yangtze River was diverted around a huge earthen coffer dam, allowing work to begin on the dam¹s superstructure. The two sides of the dam wall are already in place, like gigantic bookends, on each side of the dry channel where the Yangtze once flowed. In the end, 900 million cubic feet of concrete will be used to build a dam two kilometres long and more than 180 metres tall.
After thanking Zhang with a handful of ren min bi ("the people's money",
China's official currency), I made my way to a weather-beaten, Soviet-designed hydrofoil that would take me upstream to several of the cities soon to be submerged by the dam's floodwaters. According to government statistics, at least 1.3 million people will need to be relocated before their homes are covered with water; of that number, half will have been moved by 2003, when the reservoir will be partially filled.
As I stepped off the hydrofoil in Badong, a sooty city of 500,000 that clings to the side of the Yangtze's steep riverbank, I prepared myself to meet a few of these 1.3 million people. Like all towns along the Three Gorges, Badong is squalid along its riverfront, winding its way up to relative prosperity at higher elevations. Although many towns will be submerged by the floodwaters, Badong reaches high enough that the upper portion of the city will form the new riverfront.
My first meeting was with government tourism worker Josephine Fang, who met me in a dank teahouse four blocks up from the dock. "Half of this city will be flooded," Fang said. "Everyone at this level of the city will be moved."
Fang explained that she and her husband had already received a payment of 50,000 ren min bi (US$6,000) to relocate. Having purchased a much larger apartment on higher ground with only a third of this money, Fang claimed that, thanks to the government, her life had improved. "The new apartment is so big my parents were able to move in with us," she said happily.
Back down on the dock, however, I met a man who told me a different tale. Cheng Yuan, a coal miner, griped that only "those with good jobs are getting the money the government has promised". According to Cheng, payments are only made to those people who have the leverage to make a fuss if they don't get anything. Factory workers, farmers, the unemployed, and the aging will be given only survival stipends (roughly US$8 per month) called "living allowances" when they are forced to move.
In the unsightly city of Wushan, Zhu Zhong, a riverboat operator, said he is looking forward to being moved. "Wushan is a smelly little city; I don't care if it is washed away," he said. "My brother bought a home in the new city and he has running water, electricity, air conditioning‹the works."
Though he said he will move gladly, Zhu believes Beijing will need to employ troops to move others. "Some people are tied to the land; they know nothing else but the land they were born on. I know of one old man who told me Beijing will have to kick him out by force." A smile crept its way onto Zhu's face. "Beijing better bring their best troops‹my father can be very difficult."
Joe Segar, an American-born river guide who has spent the past two years working on one of the cruise ships that plow up and down the Yangtze, claimed that most people in the region are "pretty apathetic" about the Three Gorges Dam.
"They had no say in the decision to build the dam," Segar explained, "so they feel there is nothing they can do but grin and bear it."
A few people on the river, however, have decided to take matters into their own hands. In Wanxian, the largest port city scheduled to be submerged, I was introduced to a man who asked that I refer to him only as Mr. Wang.Worried about his city¹s water supply after the dam is built, Mr. Wang meets secretly once a week with a group of other concerned residents to discuss how Wanxian will get clean water when the Yangtze is backed up. (The enormous reservoir is expected to be filled to capacity, in stages, by 2009.)
"We get most of our water from the Yangtze," Mr. Wang explained in Wanxian's peppery dialect. "The Yangtze is not a clean river, but it isn¹t so bad because it is ever-flowing. After the dam is built, the river will become a slack-water lake. Many of us here in Wanxian worry about the pollution that will build up in this lake."
Mr. Wang's fears are not unfounded. Every year, millions of tons of chemicals, heavy metals, and human waste are dumped into the Yangtze upstream in Chongqing, the region's most industrial city. International health bodies, including the World Health Organization, have expressed concern about schistosomiasis. The waterborne parasitic worm responsible for this organ-destroying disease is common in reservoirs created behind large dams in heavily populated, underdeveloped tropical areas in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
Mr. Wang explained that federal authorities have promised to build Wanxian a water-treatment facility, but construction has yet to begin. "There are new laws against dumping waste in the Yangtze, but it's difficult to change the way the people around here use the river. Chinese people are very stubborn, you know."
At their meetings, the members of Mr. Wang's group also discuss the submersion of more than 1,000 of the region's factories. "Will the pollution not leach out of these factories into our water supply?" Mr. Wang asked rhetorically.
I asked Mr. Wang what the government would do it found out about the activities of his secret think tank. "I don't care if they find out," he sniffed. "All we want is clean water. Is that a crime?"
Sedimentation of the reservoir is another point of worry. Although Chinese authorities claim that a giant sluice gate will be used to allow sediment to pass through the dam, critics maintain that gravel, boulders, and silt will settle in the bottom of the reservoir several hundred miles upstream, near Chongqing. Dredging may only intensify the river's pollution problem, but if this sedimentation is allowed to build up, it may become an obstruction to shipping.
Beijing has said little about how it plans to deal with the dam¹s alleged ecological dangers.
"The Three Gorges project is a great project, capable of producing great economic results, flood control, and generation of electricity," said He Gong, one of the dam's lead engineers, in a statement made after the completion of the diversion canal last year. When asked about the negative effects of the dam, though, He refused to elaborate. "Basically," he said, "no technical problem is insolvable."
China's case history of dam-building, however, doesn't support such a bold claim. According to Dai Qing, the dam's most outspoken critic, three percent of the dams built in China since 1949 have burst, compared to an average of just 0.6 percent in the rest of the world. Beijing only recently admitted that 85,000 people died when the Banqiao and Shimanton dams in Henan Province collapsed in 1975 (some nongovernment sources claim the actual death toll was more than 200,000). Dai spent 10 months in prison for her protests against the Three Gorges Dam, and he was eventually exiled.
Doris Shen, a lobbyist with an environmental action group called River Networks International, is another critic of the dam. According to Shen, it is not too late for the international community to halt the Three Gorges Dam. "This project is the most environmentally and socially destructive project on the planet today," Shen said in a recent phone interview, "and it can't go ahead without foreign financing."
On March 16, according to the New York Times, the official New China News Agency announced that officials with the dam project are acknowledging an investment shortfall of $4.62 billion Cdn for the current 1998 to 2003 phase of construction. Desperate to raise funds for this and other infrastructure projects, China's State Development Bank has recently floated billions of dollars worth of bonds in western markets.
Shen and others at River Networks International have been working around the clock to prevent western lending institutions from underwriting these bonds. Letters of protest were sent to firms likely to participate, including Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, Bank America, Salomon Smith Barney, and Credit Suisse First Boston. Though well-intentioned, environmentalists such as Shen, who want China to abandon the dam project altogether, discount the political value the dam has attained in China. "The Three Gorges Dam is just like Chairman Mao," a student from China's prestigious Foreign Languages Institute told me during a recent visit to Beijing. He pointed to a long line of people waiting to view Mao's wax-like corpse inside his cavernous Tiananmen Square mausoleum, a virtual mecca for Chinese tourists. "These tourists come here to see the most powerful man in Chinese history. They don't care about the bad things Mao did, they only care that he was powerful. It will be the same with the Three Gorges Dam when it is done. Even though it will force a million people from their homes and cause all kinds of environmental problems, Chinese people will revere it for the power it represents." First mentioned 70 years ago by Sun Yat-sen, the father of modern China, and later alluded to in a poem written by Chairman Mao, the Three Gorges Dam is a symbol for Beijing's newfound power, both hydroelectric and political. The project is also widely regarded as the pet project of former prime minister Li Peng, who is still the number-two person in the Communist Party and the head of his country's parliament, the National People's Congress. (The congress approved the dam in 1992.) Abandoning the project at this point would represent an inconceivable loss of face for the old men in Beijing. In an effort to glorify the project, Beijing has called the Three Gorges Dam China's "New Great Wall". The similarities between the two public-works projects are manifold. The Three Gorges Dam, like the Great Wall, is soaking up a huge proportion of China's wealth. Workers have been brought in from all over the country to help build the dam, just as they were in 200 B.C. for the Great Wall. For Chinese history enthusiasts, however, Beijing's decision to compare the two projects is curious. Built to protect China from nomadic tribes to the west, the Great Wall fell short of its noble purpose. A rebellion led by those who felt the Wall was a waste of resources brought down the very dynasty that had become obsessed by its construction.
Heading back downstream, my journey to Central China at an end, I wondered if opponents of the Three Gorges Dam were hoping for history to repeat itself.
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