The villagers don't need to be told. The upheaval is even greater for the thousands who make a living directly from the river. Fishermen will have to learn new skills or somehow find other employment. So will the boatmen, who have handed down their river craft from generation to generation. Not only that, these job-seekers will be competing with hundreds of thousands of workers being laid off from state enterprises.
Worries are also writ large for the engineering.
An essay by Yi Si, the pen name of a People's Liberation Army journalist who was purged after June 1989, looks back at the cover-up a couple of decades ago when two dams collapsed in Henan province. In August 1975, a typhoon swept through central China, causing reservoirs to swell suddenly, eventually bursting the Banqiao and Shimantan dams. There are no figures on the death toll because the Chinese government refuses to acknowledge the disaster, but unofficial estimates put the number at 230,000. And if a similar storm hits a massive dam, widespread tragedy may again be the result. One of the dam's main technical problems lies in controlling the build-up of sediment, which is flushed out to sea in the normal flow of a river.