Jonathan Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump

At the time, I was, like many new arrivals, impressed to find a nation that was far more open, modern, and forward-thinking than I had believed before visiting. Outside China the dam was a symbol of the communist government’s poor record on human rights and the environment. About 1.4 million people been forced from their homes by the rising waters, which inundated precious ecosystems, heritage sites, and some of the most stunning scenery on the planet, but I wanted to see if there was another side of the story.

I took a boat called the China Universe. Despite its grand name, the closest this scruffy multitiered tourist vessel came to the stars or the state was a hiccuping karaoke machine filled with patriotic songs about the Yangtze. Dirty water sloshed around on the floor of the cabin, and the galley was so dank that I was sick for a week afterward.

Up on deck, however, the view of the gorges lived up to the poems and legends. Imposingly steep and narrow at the water’s edge, the slopes rose up hundreds of feet to fantastically shaped crags that seemed to sharpen against the sky as the sun set.

It was dark by the time we reached Xiling, the last of the Three Gorges. I went to the bridge, where the captain’s face was illuminated by the sonar screen needed to negotiate this notoriously treacherous stretch of river. Crewmen illuminated the slopes on either side with searchlights that seemed to draw the jagged sides of the gorge nearer and make the river darker.

We hit the dam soon after. In the depths of the night, it was an awe-inspiring sight. Miles and miles of vast, silent darkness suddenly gave way to an enormous, noisy, frenetic building site. Everything was illuminated: the massive locks with orange fairground lights, the construction rigs with strings of colored lights, and the ground with the headlamps of cranes and tractors. The effect was that of a Spielberg science-fiction epic.

As the China Universe waited for its turn in the lock, I alighted with the other passengers to wander the site. Our guide declared the dam a “miracle for the whole world,” and briefly, I almost believed it. Watching from a viewing gallery as thousands of tons of water thundered out from turbines the size of cliff faces and churned up the river far below, I was soaked, deafened, and awestruck. This was power, raw power. Mighty but tamed. A placid reservoir above, a seething torrent below. Humanity stood between the two, controlling, directing, milking the elements.

If there was ever a moment when I was ready to embrace the man-made glory of the new China, it was then. The developed world had asked the country to reduce greenhouse gases, and here was a massive alternative to carbon-fueled power. Westerners complained about mining accidents and air pollution from coal, and now here was a hydropower plant that generated the energy equivalent of 50 million tons of coal each year. Why, I wondered, were these benefits so rarely talked about overseas? If the dam had been designed by a modern-day Isambard Kingdom Brunel, rather than Chinese communists, wouldn’t we be celebrating it as a work of genius?

But like so many aspects of China’s brave new world, the dam looked very different in the cold light of the following day, when it resembled a gray scar on an otherwise stunning landscape.

Just how big an eyesore was apparent at the exhibition center, where the flood of superlatives from the guides were part boast, part self-indictment. The dam, they said, was not just the biggest hydropower plant in the world, it also contained more concrete and steel than any other structure, and necessitated the biggest resettlement program in engineering history. The guide insisted the relocations were a success and the environmental challenges were being overcome. But there was something missing from the official endorsement of the dam. On the walls were photographs of state leaders visiting the site and congratulating the engineers on their work. But there was no picture of Hu Jintao.

Neither he nor Premier Wen Jiabao, a trained geologist, attended the dam’s completion ceremony in 2006. This raised suspicions that President Water and Premier Earth were distancing themselves from a project that was quickly proving a disaster for the river and the land.

As the water rose, the weight of the reservoir began triggering landslides and deadly waves. 23Such was the concern that the government had to postpone plans to raise the level of the reservoir to its maximum height. 24The water quality deteriorated as the river became less able to flush garbage and algae out of its system. Domestic newspapers said the pollution was “cancerous” and a threat to marine life and drinking supplies in 186 cities. The state news agency Xinhua warned that the Three Gorges could become an “environmental catastrophe” unless remedial action was taken. Alarm bells rang even louder when the State Council’s point man on the project, Wang Xiaofeng, spoke of “hidden dangers” that could cause pollution, landslides, and “other geological disasters.” 25

This represented a volte-face by the establishment. Until then, such grim warnings had come only from academia and the NGO sector. Historically, the government’s usual response to pollution and disaster was to cover up bad news and arrest the critics.

No one knew that better than Dai Qing, one of China’s most indomitable environmentalists, who was imprisoned for ten months after publishing a searing criticism of the Three Gorges Dam in 1989. After her release, she continued to be an influential critic of the government’s water-management policies and won the Goldman Environmental Prize in 1993. 26

Dai told me China had a long history of building dangerous dams and then covering up the consequences. Construction surged in the 1950s. Initially, there was a debate between Taoist and Confucian dam builders. The Taoists preferred to use low levees and the natural flow of the water, as in Dujiangyan, while the Confucians wanted high dikes and other big projects to control the course of rivers. 27Mao, as we have seen, threw his support behind the latter’s megaprojects.

In a fury of dam building at the start of the Great Leap Forward, Dai said, 580 million cubic tons of earth was shifted for barriers and irrigation channels. In one insane year, 1958, that will come up again and again in this book, the amount of earth moved for hydro projects was more than double that in the whole of the previous decade. 28

Scrappily built and inadequately checked, many collapsed with deadly consequences. The first big dam to go was the Fushan, which lasted just four months before bursting and drowning 10,000 people downstream. By 1980, 2,796 dams had failed with a combined death toll of 240,000. This was not made public until many years after.

But the problems caused by haste, vanity, and secrecy remain. “The crap from that era has not yet been cleaned up,” the former chief engineer of the Water Resources Bureau of Henan Province, Ma Shoulong, told Dai. The year 1958 may have been exceptional, but China remains a country of massive and often reckless hydro ambitions.

The biggest of them is another megascheme approved by Mao, the South-North Water Diversion Project. 29More than twice as expensive as the Three Gorges Dam and three times longer than the railway to Tibet, the fifty-year, 450-billion-yuan project aims to divert water along three channels—each nearly 1,000 kilometers long—from the moist Yangtze basin up to the dry lands north of the Yellow River. It is an emergency operation: a transfusion of water to an area dying of thirst. In European terms, it is like using the Rhône to save the Rhine. In America, imagine the Mississippi being tapped to rescue the Colorado.

The operation is staggeringly complex, expensive, politically difficult, and environmentally perilous. 30There is no certainty it will save the Yellow River, which has been massively overexploited and polluted for decades. And there is every chance that it could hasten the decline of the Yangtze.