Mr. Zhang, the editor, said he knew of no official objections to the article up to now. Officials of the Relocation and Development Office of the Three Gorges Project Construction Committee , in Beijing, said today that they only saw the article this week and could not yet comment. Li Rui, the party elder and most senior critic of the dam, said the project was too far along to cancel. They expect to raise most of the money needed with domestic bank loans and bond and stock issues. The Yangtze has already been diverted around the dam site, near Yichang, and construction is well under way.
China hopes to gain international financing for some of the costs.
This could lessen the number of uprooted people but would also reduce the economic benefits. Under the current design, the dam's generating capacity would be 18,200 megawatts, nearly twice as powerful as the Grand Coulee. The journal article features a detailed case study of Yunyang County , near Chongqing, where 120,000 of an impoverished population of 1.24 million must be moved. To fight erosion and flooding, the Government has declared that steep slopes should not be cultivated. But in Yunyang County, the article notes, nearly half the existing farms are on illegally steep slopes, and every patch of decent farmland is already in use.