Jonathan Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump

16. Following Mao’s comment, a plan was made for an eight-step development project along the upper reaches of the Min, in which the Zipingpu Dam was recommended as one of the first to be built along with Yuzui (later Yangliuhu).

17. Michael Lynch, Mao (Routledge, 2006), p. 274.

18. As early as 2001, Li Youcai voiced fears that officials were underplaying the risk of a major earthquake in the region ( China Dialogue, 2008). Fan Xiao, a chief engineer with the Sichuan Geology and Mineral Bureau, warned about Zipingpu’s seismic risks before the dam was completed. Concerns about an earthquake were also raised at a closed-door hearing in 2001 (David Murphy, “Dam the Consequences,” Far Eastern Economic Review, July 11, 2002).

19. Andrew Mertha, China’s Water Warriors: Citizen Action and Policy Change (Cornell University Press, 2008), p. 97.

20. Zipingpu was no exception. The project, which was completed with Japanese funding in 2006, displaced 33,000 people.

21. The reservoir was 660 kilometers long, which is a little more than the straight-line distance from Plymouth to Berwick-upon-Tweed.

22. The National People’s Congress, usually a rubber-stamp legislature, recorded its biggest-ever “no” vote on this issue with a third of the delegates voting against or abstaining on a motion to approve the dam. But it passed with a majority that would be considered very comfortable in a democracy.

23. Fourteen people were killed in 2004 by a 20-meter wave generated by the collapse of 20 million cubic meters of rock into the Qinggan River, just 3 kilometers from where the tributary enters the Yangtze. In 2006, dozens of landslides occurred along a 32-kilometer stretch of riverbank. Little more than a year later, thirty bus passengers were buried when the earth gave way in Badong County near another tributary into the reservoir. In Fengjie County, where landslides have forced the resettlement of 13,000 people, officials have issued warnings for 800 disaster-prone areas.

24. According to a joint report by the Nanjing Institute for Geography and Limnology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Changjiang (Yangtze) Water Resources Commission, landslides and bank collapses have been identified at 4,719 places in the reservoir area. Of these, at least 627 are associated with filling the reservoir. Chen Jiang, “Three Gorges Dam Authority Suspends Reservoir Filling,” Nanfang Zhoumo (South Weekend), November 27, 2008 (translation by Three Gorges Probe).

25. Jonathan Watts, “Three Gorges Dam Risk to Environment, Says China,” Guardian, September 27, 2007.

26. Ahead of the Olympics, a time when other dissidents were intimidated into silence or locked up, Dai authored The River Dragon Has Come! a collection of essays on the murderous follies of China’s dam-building programs. She often cities her father-in-law—a senior water ministry official—warning, “When you build a dam, you destroy a river,” though she says the book was more of an exercise in free speech than an example of green activism.

27. Judith Shapiro, Mao’s War Against Nature (Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 50.

28. Quality was of secondary importance. There were few checks and balances. It was all about quantity and forward movement, as this quote in Dai’s book from Liu Derun, the then deputy director of this office, shows: “Our daily work consisted of making phone calls to the provinces inquiring about the number of projects they were building, how many people were involved, and how much earth they had moved. In hindsight, some of the data and figures we gathered were obvious exaggerations, but no one back then had the energy to check them.”

29. In 1952, Mao observed, “Southern water is plentiful, northern water scarce.” Nobody could doubt the truth of that statement, nor did there seem any reason to dispute the almost childlike simplicity of his proposed solution: “Borrowing some water would be good.”

30. Political opposition came mainly from provinces, such as Sichuan, that would lose water as a result of the plan, according to retired general Guo Kai (interview with the author, November 2008).

31. The city of Tianjin reportedly preferred to build desalination plants, which were more expensive but supplied cleaner water. The cost was 9.5 yuan per cubic meter in 2008, according to Guo Kai.

32. To offset these fears, the government has had to earmark an extra 8 billion yuan to bolster the Han, including diverting water from the Three Gorges reservoir on the Yangtze and along the Xinglong Hinge. These measures—essentially robbing Peter to pay Paul—will require another 650 kilometers of channels to be dug through farmland.

33. The estimated cost of the dams, tunnels, and pumping stations for this complex project is more than 320 billion yuan.

34. Qian Zhengying, former minister of water conservancy and power and the driving force behind the Three Gorges Dam, told me the diversion scheme needed a rethink. “The original plans were made twenty years ago. Since then our society has developed and the natural environment has changed. My view is that we must make a new assessment of the plan for the middle and eastern legs,” she said. Scientists doubted whether the upper reaches of the Yangtze had sufficient volume to “donate” the quantities of water envisaged in the plan.

35. Among the doubters is Zuo Qiting, a professor of hydrology at Zhengzhou University, who told me, “I am not a supporter of megaprojects … One way to halt the trend of ever-bigger projects is to evaluate their impact from a wider perspective. We need to look not just locally, but at the national and global level.”

36. It is a mark of both Guo’s perseverance and the Chinese government’s openness to grand schemes that his ideas have received hearings at the highest level. In 1998, the then president Jiang Zemin called for a feasibility study. More than a dozen Mao-era generals from the People’s Liberation Army are behind him, including retired air force major general Wang Dinglie, one of the last survivors of the Long March. In 2005, Guo and his collaborator Li Ling published details of the diversion plan in a book titled How Tibet’s Water Will Save China, based on seventeen years of research. It was put on the politburo reading list, reportedly on the orders of President Hu Jintao.

37. When I met him, the general told me he always knew the scheme was impossible. “The Himalayas are made up of four mountain ranges, two of which are on Indian territory. Even if we blew a hole on our side, they would never approve to doing the same on theirs.”

38. Qian Zhengying, the former water resources minister who pushed through the Three Gorges Dam, told me China needs to rethink the way it treats water. “We need to adapt our economic production to follow the natural course of water rather than the other way round” (interview with author).

39. Hydro plants were the main beneficiaries of foreign funds channeled to China under the UN-managed Clean Development Mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol to combat climate change by reducing greenhouse gases (Joe Macdonald, “China Dams Reveal Flaws in Climate-Change Weapon,” Associated Press, January 25, 2009).

40. Among the best sources on this is Ma Jun, “Overexploitation of Southwestern Hydropower.”

41. Xiao Yunhan, deputy director general of high-tech research and development at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told me in an interview: “People often forget that when you build a one-kilowatt renewable energy plant you need to build the same size coal plant as a backup. I have read about that in Sichuan with dams. They need a coal plant as a backup or else they would only have a half life.”

42. China now produces more than 80 percent of the world’s yellow phosphorus. Since 1985, its output of the compound has risen more than sixteen-fold, while production in Europe has been cut by two-thirds, in the U.S. by half, and in Japan completely eradicated. Yet these rich economies continue to import large amounts of yellow phosphorus, as an ingredient for products ranging from herbicides and fertilizers to steel, semiconductors, and tracer bullets.