The River at the Centre of the World (29 page)

The flooding of the valley that would result would be far worse than previously envisaged: it would mean that 1,250,000 people would have to be moved, whether they liked it or not. Thirteen cities like Wanxian (150,000 people) and Fuling (80,000) would be inundated; 140 normal-sized towns would go under, another 1352 villages would be either wholly or partly submerged. Some 8000 recognized archaeological sites would disappear, and scores of temples and pagodas would vanish beneath the waters. The Gorges themselves would cease to be places of rapids and whirlpools, becoming instead a mere section of a deep and placid lake, with only the barest downstream movement of its waters; and even the steep embankments of Chongqing, so much a part of the city's character for so many thousands of years, would be flooded to the point where Yangtze water would be lapping against the city's lower slum streets.

But at the same time – and this is why shipping firms rallied instantly behind Li's announcement – ten-thousand-ton cargo vessels and passenger liners would be able to journey the entire way from the ocean to Chongqing. Nearly 80 per cent of China's waterborne trade goes along the Yangtze: the dam and its effects on navigation would increase the tonnage of Yangtze river cargoes fivefold and reduce costs by 35 per cent. Chongqing, 1300 miles from the sea and currently limited by the rapids of the Three Gorges to receiving low-water summertime ships of no more than 1500 tons, would become a major Chinese port, able to take truly big ocean-going ships all year round. A hinterland that is truly the heartland of the nation would have its products shipped to world markets with a speed and economy it had never known before.

The power generation establishment rallied behind the government too, and with similar enthusiasm. The plans called for generators to crank out more than 18 gigawatts – 18,200 megawatts – of electrical power. This is four times more than any power station in Europe; compared with other dams, it is eight times the power capacity of the Nile's Aswan Dam, and half as much again as the world's current largest river dam, the Itaipu Dam in Paraguay. Truly the Three Gorges Dam was an almighty project: in the propaganda I had received in the mail before I left, a writer writhed in ecstasy as he posed to his readers a rhetorical question:

‘This is an opportunity that knocks but once… an opportunity to display our talent to the fullest… If a foreign friend asks:
What will you, the Chinese all over the world, leave for this era? we must reply firmly: The Yangtze River Three Gorges Project! We'll present this epic undertaking which will benefit the nation and the people not only for the present but for centuries to come.
’

Li Peng needed a project of this magnitude and stature to revivify his image and his fellow leaders' morale, still shaken by the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square tragedies. He joined the chorus of hyperbole: ‘The Three Gorges Dam,’ he declared in 1992, ‘will show the rest of the world that the Chinese people have high aspirations and the capabilities to successfully build the world's largest water conservancy and hydroelectric power project.’

Moreover, there was a portent. It did not pass unnoticed that the projected date for the highly symbolic closing of the Yangtze's flow – a central part of a dam-building project, when the waters are passed around the dam site in diversion tunnels – was due to take place in 1997. That was also the year when Hong Kong would revert from British rule back to China's, after 155 years in the barbarian wilderness. The idea that Li Peng's China – or Deng Xiaoping's China, for the former is little more than a puppet of the latter – could in the same year also fly in the face of the barbarian opposition, which was already mounting, and stop up her greatest river: the symbolism of such coincidence augured exceedingly well, in the minds of the masters of the moment.

For by now not everyone, particularly outside China, was quite so enthusiastic. The foreign firms and government organizations that had been so eager to support the Chinese from the start of the project began to have their doubts only a few years later, as the avarice of one decade began to transmute into the more considered caution of the next. In part the doubts arose because of the new zeitgeist: a general feeling had arisen that large dams were ill-conceived projects, that few of them had realized the expectations offered for them, that all were too costly, most had caused grave environmental impacts on their surroundings, and that each was little more than pomposity writ in concrete, with totalitarian regimes favouring them most notably, as a way of impressing the peasantry with the rulers' energy, acumen and skill. The head of the US Bureau of Reclamation made a speech in 1994: from the organization that had built the Grand Coulee and the Hoover and the Glen Canyon Dams came word that, so far as America was concerned, the days of big-dam building were well and truly over. ‘Large dams are tremendously expensive,’ said the hitherto uncontroversial American hydrologist Daniel Beard. ‘They always cost more than you thought and tie up huge sums of capital for many years… There is no more visible symbol in the world of what we are trying to move away from than the Three Gorges Dam.’

*

The Three Gorges Dam – which the big-dam building
industry
still very much wanted, to construct, of course, no matter what was being said by official America – soon began to fall into popular disfavour for more specific reasons. A number of key reports on the dam each appeared to have buried within its text at least one major misgiving about the wisdom of so vast an undertaking – misgivings that, when added each to the other, slowly began to assume critical mass.

The US Army Corps of Engineers, for example, concluded that the dam would not, as intended, necessarily prevent flooding downstream. For a start, its engineers noted, a very large proportion of the Yangtze's water comes from tributaries – like the Han Shui, which roars in at the tri-city junction of Wuhan – that join the Yangtze below the dam. Then again, said the Corps technicians, there were very real risks that the dam could be breached – landslides, earthquakes (not uncommon in the hills to the east of the Sichuan Basin) and even war or terrorism could all place the structure at risk – with unimaginably terrible consequences for the huge cities sited downstream. Yichang, for example – this day's destination – would be drowned in a matter of hours: hundreds of thousands of people could die.

The Canadian governments International Aid Agency wrote a multi-volume study of the dam in 1989, recommending that it go ahead. But even this study – which was the basis for Li Peng's announcement of the reservoir height, and which had given him the necessary fillip to inaugurate the project formally – cautioned that in the still waters of the reservoir, huge quantities of silt would accumulate behind the dam wall. These would in time clog the turbine entranceways – and, more significantly, they would produce a lack of sediment in the river downstream of the dam, causing the river to flow more quickly, to scour the banks and the riverbed more severely, and to change the character – and the predictability – of an already wayward and capricious waterway even more. The walls of the Jinjiang flood diversion dykes – over which Lily and I were flying, and in which I saw suspiciously little water – would be seriously scoured by the new fast-flowing, sediment-poor waters: they would have to be strengthened and maybe even rebuilt, or else those living beside them would be at dire risk of even more dangerous flooding than they know already. Was this the kind of risk worth taking?

Other reports warned that this same lack of sediment would have damaging effects far, far downstream. Shanghai, more than a thousand miles away at the Yangtze's end, is a city built on top of a plain of sediment that is pushing itself outward into the East China Sea by more than two inches every day. But the arriving silt – so long as it arrives – also strengthens the bed on which Shanghai is built, a bed which is currently being undermined by tunnels and subways and all manner of the kind of human intervention expected in a rapidly expanding metropolis. Because of this, the city is already in danger of subsiding, slowly and perilously: the more the digging and the less the tonnage of arriving sediment, the more vulnerable is this biggest of Chinese cities to inundation by the very sea on which she is built. And beyond this danger, the lessening in the overall flow of the river will allow the tidal effects of the sea to seep farther back in the estuary, changing fishing patterns and altering the salinity of the soils and the groundwater. The effects of the dam, in this one very specialist area of interest, are legion.

Other effects are just as startling. Much was uncovered by the courageous work of a young Beijing journalist named Dai Qing, an engineer-turned-environmental-writer who is also, as it happened, the adopted daughter of one of China's most distinguished army marshals and a woman not to be toyed with. Miss Dai, who knew her subject, was appalled at the risky business of building the Yangtze dam, and throughout the late eighties she carefully collected a series of academic papers by well-respected engineers and hydrologists, each of whom had competent, well-argued and sound reasons for opposing the dam.

She gathered these papers – with nicely turned Chinese titles like ‘The Limited Benefits of Flood Control’, ‘We Are Very Worried, We Are Very Concerned: An Interview with Zhou Peiyuan and Lin Huainto' and ‘High Dam: Sword of Damocles' – into a book that she decided to call
Chang Jiang! Chang Jiang
!. In a moment of unparalleled chutzpah she then persuaded a publisher, a woman in the south-western city of Guiyang, to offer the book for sale early in 1989. This was just a few months before the student uprising in Beijing that culminated in the Tiananmen Square tragedy in June: the book was published when the country was in a dangerous ferment, and news of its contributors' opposition to the dam spread wildly across the country. Within months, two things had happened: all of China's elite and intelligentsia knew of the risks that were involved in going ahead with the monster project, and Dai Qing was languishing in prison. She stayed there for ten months, the country's first ‘green' victim, though in truth a dissident, like so many scores of others.
*

The cascade effect of Dai Qing's book was quite remarkable, especially since it was to become the central issue in the first attempt at a parliamentary rebellion to take place in the country since the Communist victory in 1949.

First of all, in the late summer, the State Council announced it was postponing the project – not because of the book, of course; it camouflaged its reasons behind a bland and fatuous technical excuse. At the same time, stimulated by the opposition and the project's postponement, more papers began to emerge from the technical theocracies; one of them admitted that sixty small dams and two huge dams, the Banqiao and the Shimantan in Henan province, had all collapsed in August 1975, with tens of thousands – perhaps even hundreds of thousands – drowned. China's ability to engineer dams to withstand the extremes of rain and river was thrown into question – not the purely theoretical question of whether a dam the size of the Three Gorges project could be constructed safely, but whether, since a dam one fortieth as big had burst during a bad rainstorm, the country had the practical skills to be building big dams at all.

But it was the democratic rebellion that then followed that may be Dai Qing's most memorable legacy. The ‘technical problems' cited as the reason for the 1989 postponement were announced mysteriously ‘solved' in 1992, following which Li Peng finally went ahead and made the long-awaited construction announcement. But first, the Chinese constitution being what it is, he was obliged to put the matter to, and secure the rubberstamp approval of, the National People's Congress. The Congress met in Beijing in April 1992, with the delegates being canvassed like rarely before: opposition to the dam, based on Dai Qing's book, on the news of her imprisonment, and on the cascade of new academic papers her troubles had unleashed, was voiced outside the hall. A motion was introduced to present a speech criticizing the project. The meeting's chairman, however – acting on orders from the regime – said there would be no discussion: the vote would be taken there and then, on whether to include the project formally in the final Ten Year Plan of the twentieth century.

Cries of protest were heard. ‘The Congress has violated its own laws,’ yelled one opponent, aghast that no discussion would be permitted. She pressed her ‘No' button for the electronic tally. So, it turned out, did scores of others. Of the 2613 delegates who had gathered on that cool Friday afternoon, 813 – almost one third either voted against it or abstained. It was, in Chinese terms, a stunning rebellion against Party authority. By the end of the day it had become apparent that although Li Peng had won, it was a Pyrrhic victory, one that the whole world regarded in fact as a sweeping vote of no confidence.

One by one the international community's money sources, appalled by what had happened and by the growing perceived financial risks of the project, dropped away. The World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, Britain's Overseas Development Agency, America's Import-Export Bank, even Canada's International Aid Agency, which had once been so keen – they all said no, they would no longer participate in funding the dam.

The US Bureau of Reclamation, which had earlier signed a technical services agreement with the dam managers, now found itself threatened with lawsuits by seven American environmental organizations, who claimed that by taking part in the dam construction the bureau violated the terms of the Endangered Species Act. The bureau changed its mind hastily. In a terse note to the Chinese it said its technical cooperation would be suspended, ‘effective this day’. Risk managers in the big private companies – the merchant banks, the insurance brokers, the construction firms – said in increasing numbers that they now saw the Three Gorges Dam as an insupportable project, one that was vastly expensive, by no means a prudent investment.

The Chinese then had no choice but to do what the Chinese in such circumstances are the best at doing: they began to organize the entire project by themselves. China, in the matter of the Yangtze dam, was by the beginning of 1994 essentially on her own. Or she seemed to be at first.