Jonathan Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump

Swimming meant a lot more than exercise to Mao. He used it to demonstrate his mastery of the waters and political authority. One of the first things he did after taking power in 1949 was to have a pool built in his new residence, where he would later embarrass the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who could not swim. 17Seven years later, after a dip in the Yangtze, the chairman wrote the poem “Swim,” which declared that a dam would be built at the Three Gorges, and set the stage for a frenzy of hydroengineering projects during the Great Leap Forward. They were a disaster, but Mao returned from the political doldrums in 1966 with the most famous swim in Chinese political history. Mao’s dip in the Yangtze at the age of seventy-three demonstrated his physical and political vigor. Scratchy propaganda footage of that event shows hundreds of adoring youths plunging into the waters behind Mao with red flags. The Cultural Revolution followed soon after. Mao had used water to change the direction of the country.

The political chaos of those years saved Dujiangyan. The ancient waterworks were due to be flooded under plans to build a series of dams on the Min. Work on Zipingpu and another barrier began in 1958 but had to be halted amid the famines and chaos of the 1960s. It was not until the 1990s that the plan was revived.

Despite warnings of seismic instability, 18the government pressed ahead with a dam that could provide a stable supply of water and 3.4 kilowatt-hours of annual electricity-generating capacity for the provincial capital of Chengdu. With the backing of the politburo and Japanese finance for the $800 million project, Zipingpu was named one of the nation’s “ten key projects” and put at the forefront of a massive plan to develop the poor western regions of China. 19

Critics had little opportunity to express their concerns. There was no mention of the seismic risks in the domestic media. Most of the hearings were held behind closed doors. Construction started in 2001. Tens of thousands of people were relocated. Less than two years after the reservoir was filled, the earthquake struck.

My goal was to get to the epicenter. Looking down from the top of the dam into the shadow of Zipingpu, I saw the makeshift military camp that served as the doorway in and out of the central disaster zone. Tents, trucks, and high-speed dinghies clustered on the shore of the reservoir, which stretched back beyond Yingxiu, the town directly above the seismic rip. I scrambled down the steep slope to the river, passing evacuees who had just come off the boats at the jetty. They carried few belongings. Many left homes and loved ones buried under the rubble.

The camp thronged with soldiers and medics. They had little time for journalists. My first direct attempt to board a ferry was impatiently rebuffed. I switched my attention to a group of young soldiers gathered around the dinghies. I had come prepared for such a situation with a carton of Zhongnanhai cigarettes, which I took out of my backpack as a self-introduction. I am not a smoker, but I knew the soldiers would be more willing to chat over a cigarette while they waited for orders to move out. There was no guarantee I could join them, but my best chance was to wait and hope and smoke. The time and tobacco paid off. Two hours and three packets of Zhongnanhai later, they finally got the word to go. I was thrown an orange life jacket and told to jump in a dinghy. I felt a sense of gratitude from deep in the bottom of my lungs.

At any other time, the hour-long ride along the river would have been a pleasure. But we were among the first to see the effects of the seismic facelift. We passed newly exposed hillsides, where the slopes had slipped into the waters, and a missing section of a massive bridge that left me imagining cars below the water that must have plunged into the sudden void.

Our dinghy cut around eddies of debris and frequently reduced speed to pass through clusters of broken branches or to avoid large pieces of timber floating in the river.

I started chatting to the other civilian on the boat, who was carrying a large red-white-and-blue-striped plastic bag that suggested he was a migrant worker. Wang Fangbin was happy to talk. Worry and determination had driven him 2,000 kilometers over the previous four days almost without sleep. As soon as he heard the news of the earthquake, he had left his job as a construction worker in distant Xinjiang and headed back to his hometown for the first time in seven years.

“I have to see if my mother is OK. It looks as though everything was flattened,” he said with impressive equanimity. “I don’t know if my home will still be there. I want to see for myself.”

Wang was part of the floating population of migrants that have built modern China. Estimated at between 100 and 200 million, this vast population of itinerant workers had provided the human fuel for the country’s economic engine. They were a flood unleashed.

During the Mao era, migration was tightly restricted. Without permission, it was very difficult for people to leave the area of their hukou (family registration). But after the economic reforms of the late 1970s, controls were relaxed, allowing a huge pool of cheap rural labor to move to factory production lines and city construction sites. The spectacular economic development that followed is largely attributable to the opening of the migration floodgates.

But the surge of people away from their homes had brought with it a sense of restlessness, uncertainty, and social unease. This was particularly true when the relocation was forced, as was often the case for major construction projects, especially dams. 20As familiar buildings were reduced to rubble, as neighbors moved on and values seemed to become as fluid as the waters of the Yangtze, early twenty-first-century China was a country where it was possible to feel lost simply by standing still.

Mutability inspired some of the best contemporary art and film in China. The most evocative was Still Life, a film about the Yangtze, released in 2005 by the director Jia Zhangke. At once stunningly beautiful and disturbingly bleak, it told the story of a Sichuanese migrant who, like Wang, returned after ten years to search for a family in a town reduced to rubble and soon to be swallowed by the elements. In this case it was not an earthquake that transformed the landscape, but demolition teams and the Three Gorges Dam. The scenes of devastation, however, were remarkably similar.

Close to 1.4 million people were relocated for the Three Gorges Dam, the most ambitious and controversial hydroelectric development ever undertaken. It took fifty years to plan, fifteen years to build, $24 billion to pay for, and 16 million tons of reinforced concrete to fill. The giant barrier has created a reservoir that stretches back along the Yangtze almost the length of England. 21This mass of water drives twenty-six giant turbines to generate up to 18,000 megawatt-hours of electricity. There are few more fitting monuments to early twenty-first-century China.

Even more than Zipingpu, the Three Gorges Dam was driven forward over massive political opposition and scientific doubt. Three generations of strongmen pushed it through: Sun Yat-sen approved a plan for the dam in 1919 as a defense against floods; Mao Zedong took the idea a step further in the 1950s, when he commissioned Russian engineers to draw up blueprints; but construction could not begin until 1992 when the premier, Li Peng, forced the plan through despite unusually vocal domestic opposition. 22As with Zipingpu, the rebalancing of people and water along the biggest river in China triggered far deeper social and environmental disturbance than anticipated.

I too failed to grasp the consequences the first time I traversed the chocolate brown waters of the Yangtze. It was 2003. The Three Gorges Dam was not yet finished, but I was upbeat. For an energy-hungry nation, the dam seemed a clean alternative to thirty conventional power stations. It would also reduce the risks of the deadly floods that killed thousands and ravaged croplands every few years.