Newsgroups: bit.listserv.biosph-l
Date:         Mon, 12 Oct 1992 12:02:43 EDT
Reply-To:     BRACHAR@SUVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU
From:         BRACHAR@SUVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU

Re:        Three Gorges Dam in China
           excerpt from China News Digest


The following is from the China News Digest (CND) (CNDUB-L) concerning
the Three Gorges Dam to be built in China.
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1. The Three Gorges Dam: Taming the Dragon or Destroying the Future .... 236
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From: Weihe Guan
Source: The Sacramento Bee, 10/05/92
By: Stephen Magagnini

"Men will triumph over nature." -- Mao Tse-Tung

Yichang, China -- For 4,000 years the "Dragon of China" -- the Yangtze River
-- has held the power of life and death over the Chinese.

Its waters nourish most of China's 1.15 billion people -- 70% of China's
rice is grown in the fertile Yangtze basin.

This spring, after more than half a century of debate, the Chinese
government finally decided to tame the dragon, or try to.

It plans to build the world's greatest hydroelectric dam at the most
treacherous section of the Yangtze -- the Three Gorges.

On its 3,500-mile journey from Tibet to Shanghai, the Yangtze carves its way
through the Three Gorges, a mystical 120-mile gallery of fog-shrouded peaks,
sheer cliffs and huge whirlpools that have inspired Chinese poets from Li Po
(701 - 762 A.D.) to Chairman Mao.

The Three Gorges Dam -- designed to generate more power than any dam in the
world -- is a tremendous gamble.

If it works, the dam will electrify China.  Communist officials say the dam
-- expected to cost at least $11 billion and take 20 years to build -- will
be the greatest engineering feat since the Great Wall and the source of
China's future prosperity.

But critics predict it will be a multibillion-dollar boondoggle, an
environmental and social disaster of epic proportions.  A battle is being
waged in three continents to keep the steel-and-concrete behemoth from ever
being built.

The dam will turn the roiling butterscotch waters of the middle Yangtze,
including the Three Gorges, into a giant reservoir that will inundate 19
counties, including prime farmland, and force the relocation of more than
one million Chinese -- the largest resettlement in world history.  Critics
compare it to flooding the Grand Canyon.

Opponents fear the dam will kill off the vanishing Yangtze dolphin and
sturgeon, transform the Yangtze into a sewer for industrial wastes, wipe out
ancient towns, trigger landslides and earthquakes, drain the national budget
and disrupt the lives of the 1.2 million people -- roughly the population of
Sacramento county -- who will be forced to move.

"The failure of the Three Gorges Dam will rank as the world's greatest
man-made disaster," said water engineer Phil Williams, president of the
Berkeley-based International Rivers Network.

"It will be a disaster, not only to China, but to the world, because it will
delay economic reform (and) without economic reforms, we will have no
political freedoms," said Dai Qing, a leading Chinese journalist who was
jailed for nearly a year after she published a book of essays criticizing
the dam.

"This is a very important time," said Qing, now a visiting lecturer at
Harvard University.  "China wants to transfer to a modern society.  the
leaders should have money in their hands for a lot of things instead of
putting the money in just one dam."

Construction could start as early as next year.  Opponents say it will
forever ruin the rare beauty of the Three Gorges, so revered it appears on
Chinese currency.

"Young people would rather sail down the Three Gorges than see the Great
Wall," said Haipei Xue, 32, a Chinese sociology student and founder of the
International Three Gorges Coalition to stop the dam.  "It's the most
visited place in China, a cultural and historical symbol, more than a symbol
-- it's still there, with towns and villages built thousands of years ago."

But the Three Gorges Dam, too, has become a national symbol of China's
ability to conquer nature on a scale never before achieved.

"We compare the Yangtze River to a dragon, with the head in Shanghai's
Pudong economic development zone," saied Tang Zhangjin, the official in
charge of the Three Gorges population resettlement.

"The tail is (from) the project site to Chongqing (a city of 14 million at
the west end of the dam's 300-mile reservoir).  The government will try to
enliven the whole dragon by bringing to life the tail to speed up
development and open the region to foreign investors."

The government has promised to build two new cities, 11 new towns and 140
new villages for the refuges who will be displaced by the 350-mile-long
reservoir.

But, said Williams, "there are at least half a million people left in the
reservoir area who will be absolutely flooded out in the event of a
100-year-flood.  Whoever's in charge of the dam will have to play God:
whether to save them or a few million people downstream."

A third of the dams' $11 billion price tag will be used to give the refuges
new homes and new jobs, Tang said.  "We plan to develop industries that use
a lot of power and require a lot of transport -- metallurgy, chemicals,
building materials, paper mills, food processing plants."

The refuges, who earn an average of $90 a year, are among the poorest and
most backward people in China.  Most of them say the dam -- and its promise
of new homes and better-paid jobs -- is long overdue.  For 30 years, plans
for the dam have kept this poverty-stricken area in economic limbo while the
rest of China has beed developed.

In Wanxian, most of the 300,000 residents are unsentimental about losing
their gritty, penitentiary-style apartments and factories to the rising
waters.  "The need for building materials will be enormous," said Tang Yong,
a 22-year-old clothing salesman.  "The factories here producing those
materials will make big money."

Cai Wenmei, a demographer at Beijing University who has studied six
resettlements, says each has been a failure.  In 1958, the government moved
200,000 people to make way for Xinanjiang Dam near Hangzhou.  "In 1986,
there were still 20,000 people living at the water level, just above the
reservoir," she said.

The migrants, unable to find new jobs, either eked out a miserable existence
in a mountain surrounded by water, or returned like lemmings to their old
homes.  "They had gone and come back four times, and had been flooded out
twice," Cai said.

One farmer tearfully told her he was given 13 yuan -- about $2.5 -- to start
his life over.  Many migrants can't get along with their neighbors, who
claim the newcomers are taking food from their bowls, Cai, said.

Lin Zongcheng, an anthropologist at John Hopkins University, spent a year
living among the 70,000 people displaced by the Shuikou Dam in southeast
China.

"These people were rice farmers for 1,000 years," he said.  "Now some of the
old people commit suicide because they have no place to go, psychologically.
Their lives radically change and they lose face and they lose power," since
their new homes don's belong to them, but their children.

"An old farmer and his wife, both more than 70, got angry with their
daughter-in-law who disrespected them while they were living in their son's
home, so they hung themselves."

Tang said some of the energy revenues will be used to help the migrants
adjust.  "If they want, we will move their ancestors tombs," he said.
Archeological digs and historical sites along the river will also be moved.

Power is scare in central China, and factories are often shut down one week
a month.  Many Chinese say cheap, plentiful electricity will lead to
modernization and Wester-style comfort.

"Maybe many people now have money to buy TVs and refrigerators, but
electricity is very expensive and usage is limited to 60 kilowatt hours
every month," said Frank Zhou, an engineer from Wuxi, near Shanghai.  (The
average Sacramento home uses 750 kilowatt hours a month).

The dam is expected to generate a recod 17.7 billion kilowatts a year, or 84
billion kilowatt hours, enough to supply the power needs of 150 million
Chinese.

But opponents say it would be cheaper and less risky to build smaller dams
upstream of the Three Gorges.  They say China should rely on solar, wind and
other alternative energy sources and improve the energy efficiency of its
outdated factories.

The International Rivers Network, Friends of the Earth, the Center for
Marine Conservation, Probe International of Canada, the Worldwide Fund for
Nature in Hong Kong and the Asian Pacific People's Network in Malaysia have
joined forces with several Chinese environmental groups to fight the dam.

They have lobbied the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which has been hired by
China to help design the dam, to stay out of the project.  They've pressured
the World Bank, wich has funded other mega-dams, not to fund this one.
They've taken their case to the International Tribunal in Amsterdam and won
a symbolic victory -- the court ruled the dam shouldn't be built until an
impartial environmental assessment is done and the people being moved are
heard from.

But global pressure has had a hard time penetrating China.  The dam is
already the most studied engineering project in history.

In the last year, the Chinese government has muffled criticism and unleashed
a flood of pro-dam propaganda -- "the heaviest bombardment we've seen since
the Cultural Revolution (1966-76)," said Haipei Xue of the Three Gorges
Coalition.  "This issue enjoys less freedom than any political issue in
China."

The Three Gorges Dam has been a glean in the eye of Chinese leaders since
Sun Yat Sen first proposed it in 1919.  In 1957 Chairman Mao, who often swam
in the Yangtze, wrote a poem that foretold of the giant dam:

    "Walls of stone will stand upstream to the west
    To hold back ... clouds and rain
    And a level lake will appear in the steep gorges."

After decades of controversy, China's government finally thinks it has the
money and the know-how to build Mao's superdam.

"The most important reason for the dam is to prevent flooding downstream,"
said Tang.  In 1931, monster floods submerged more than 35,000 square miles
in the Yangtze basin, killing 140,000 people and leaving as many as 40
million others homeless.  Killer floods in 1935 and 1954 took another
175,000 lives.

But Williams said the dam is little more than "a massive misguided monument
to progress ... the flood-control benefit is minimal.  It is far more
cost-effective to ensure that the existing levee system is maintained and
upgraded and safe."

While the opposition targets the World Bank and other possible funding
sources, Tang said the Chinese can handle the whole cost of the dam, a
mile long, 200-yard-high colossus requiring 11.3 million tons of steel.

But critics, including some Chinese experts, say the dam will take twice as
long and cost up to five times more than projected.

The Yangtze gets its butter-scotch hue from the mountains of silt and sand
that wash downriver.  Critics say the huge silt build-up could clog the
reservoir, seriously limiting the dam's ability to generate power and
control floods, and preventing 10,000-ton cargo ships from reaching
Chongqing.  The critics point to the Sanmenxia Dam in China' Yellow River,
which clogged up four years after it was built.

Tang said the government will build smaller dams to catch the silt, and
plant trees in the new riverbank to prevent erosion.  Special hatcheries
will be created to save the Yangtze sturgeon and river dolphin from
extinction.

This April, two-thirds of the 2,633-member Chinese People's Congress voted
to build the dam -- only 12 votes more than the minimum necessary and one of
the lowest level of support ever given to a government-backed project.

"The advocates of the dam know they've won the battle, but they haven't yet
won the war," said Xue.  "They know that this is their last chance -- the
political atmosphere is changing, the country is opening up, there's a
budding environmental movement and people have less and less tolerance for
this project and the lack of freedom to discuss it."

In the next few weeks, the 14th party Congress will convene to chart China's
future.  "There is a chance they will stop the dam," said dissident
journalist Dai Qing.

"The core of Communist leadership is not committed to this," added Xue.
"They know they can get burned easily by the project."

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2. Plan Made to Resettle 1.13 Million People for Three Gorges Dam ....... 30
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From: A CND Reader
Source: Reuter, Oct. 7, 1992

BEIJING - CHINA has hammered out a plan to resettle 1.13 million people
living in the path of what will be the world's largest dam project.

Some 632 sq km (244 sq miles) -- 140 towns and 13 county seats -- will be
displaced by the waters of the Yangtze River when the $10 billion Three
Gorges Dam project is completed in 18 years, the official Xinhua news agency
said on Wednesday.

The Three Gorges project stirred controversy because it will drive so many
people from their homes and obliterate some of China's loveliest scenery.
Fu Xiutang, vice chairman of the Yangtze River Water Conservancy Committee
told the agency: "Governments at all levels will guide the resettlement with
the most advanced technology and theory, pay much attention to the technical
training of immigrants and help them improve life skills."

Fu said his 800-member resettlement team had scouted new locations for the
displaced residents, the agency said. He gave no details on where or when
the people would begin to move.

The dam waters will cover some 23,800 hectares (58,800 acres) of farmland
and 657 factories must be moved, the agency said.

Some 10 million Chinese have been resettled due to similar dam projects
since the Communists took power in 1949, Fu noted.

The government formally approved the plan in March despite a rare debate in
the normally docile rubber-stamp parliament.

Opponents feared the dam, the world's largest at 185 metres (600 feet) high,
would be vulnerable to air raids in the event of war.

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Any comments from the readers of the list?

Anthony Brach
BRACHAR@SUVM.BITNET
BRACHAR@SUVM.ACS.SYR.EDU
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