When a Billion Chinese Jump (10 page)

Mutability inspired some of the best contemporary art and film in China. The most evocative was
Still Life,
a film about the Yangtze, released in 2005 by the director Jia Zhangke. At once stunningly beautiful and disturbingly bleak, it told the story of a Sichuanese migrant who, like Wang, returned after ten years to search for a family in a town reduced to rubble and soon to be swallowed by the elements. In this case it was not an earthquake that transformed the landscape, but demolition teams and the Three Gorges Dam. The scenes of devastation, however, were remarkably similar.

Close to 1.4 million people were relocated for the Three Gorges Dam, the most ambitious and controversial hydroelectric development ever undertaken. It took fifty years to plan, fifteen years to build, $24 billion to pay for, and 16 million tons of reinforced concrete to fill. The giant barrier has created a reservoir that stretches back along the Yangtze almost the length of England.
²¹
This mass of water drives twenty-six giant turbines to generate up to 18,000 megawatt-hours of electricity. There are few more fitting monuments to early twenty-first-century China.

Even more than Zipingpu, the Three Gorges Dam was driven forward over massive political opposition and scientific doubt. Three generations of strongmen pushed it through: Sun Yat-sen approved a plan for the dam in 1919 as a defense against floods; Mao Zedong took the idea a step further in the 1950s, when he commissioned Russian engineers to draw up blueprints; but construction could not begin until 1992 when the premier, Li Peng, forced the plan through despite unusually vocal domestic opposition.
²²
As with Zipingpu, the rebalancing of people and water along the biggest river in China triggered far deeper social and environmental disturbance than anticipated.

I too failed to grasp the consequences the first time I traversed the chocolate brown waters of the Yangtze. It was 2003. The Three Gorges Dam was not yet finished, but I was upbeat. For an energy-hungry nation, the dam seemed a clean alternative to thirty conventional power stations. It would also reduce the risks of the deadly floods that killed thousands and ravaged croplands every few years.

At the time, I was, like many new arrivals, impressed to find a nation that was far more open, modern, and forward-thinking than I had believed before visiting. Outside China the dam was a symbol of the communist government’s poor record on human rights and the environment. About 1.4 million people been forced from their homes by the rising waters, which inundated precious ecosystems, heritage sites, and some of the most stunning scenery on the planet, but I wanted to see if there was another side of the story.

I took a boat called the
China Universe.
Despite its grand name, the closest this scruffy multitiered tourist vessel came to the stars or the state was a hiccuping karaoke machine filled with patriotic songs about the Yangtze. Dirty water sloshed around on the floor of the cabin, and the galley was so dank that I was sick for a week afterward.

Up on deck, however, the view of the gorges lived up to the poems and legends. Imposingly steep and narrow at the water’s edge, the slopes rose up hundreds of feet to fantastically shaped crags that seemed to sharpen against the sky as the sun set.

It was dark by the time we reached Xiling, the last of the Three Gorges. I went to the bridge, where the captain’s face was illuminated by the sonar screen needed to negotiate this notoriously treacherous stretch of river. Crewmen illuminated the slopes on either side with searchlights that seemed to draw the jagged sides of the gorge nearer and make the river darker.

We hit the dam soon after. In the depths of the night, it was an awe-inspiring sight. Miles and miles of vast, silent darkness suddenly gave way to an enormous, noisy, frenetic building site. Everything was illuminated: the massive locks with orange fairground lights, the construction rigs with strings of colored lights, and the ground with the headlamps of cranes and tractors. The effect was that of a Spielberg science-fiction epic.

As the
China Universe
waited for its turn in the lock, I alighted with the other passengers to wander the site. Our guide declared the dam a “miracle for the whole world,” and briefly, I almost believed it. Watching from a viewing gallery as thousands of tons of water thundered out from turbines the size of cliff faces and churned up the river far below, I was soaked, deafened, and awestruck. This was power, raw power. Mighty but tamed. A placid reservoir above, a seething torrent below. Humanity stood between the two, controlling, directing, milking the elements.

If there was ever a moment when I was ready to embrace the man-made glory of the new China, it was then. The developed world had asked the country to reduce greenhouse gases, and here was a massive alternative to carbon-fueled power. Westerners complained about mining accidents and air pollution from coal, and now here was a hydropower plant that generated the energy equivalent of 50 million tons of coal each year. Why, I wondered, were these benefits so rarely talked about overseas? If the dam had been designed by a modern-day Isambard Kingdom Brunel, rather than Chinese communists, wouldn’t we be celebrating it as a work of genius?

But like so many aspects of China’s brave new world, the dam looked very different in the cold light of the following day, when it resembled a gray scar on an otherwise stunning landscape.

Just how big an eyesore was apparent at the exhibition center, where the flood of superlatives from the guides were part boast, part self-indictment. The dam, they said, was not just the biggest hydropower plant in the world, it also contained more concrete and steel than any other structure, and necessitated the biggest resettlement program in engineering history. The guide insisted the relocations were a success and the environmental challenges were being overcome. But there was something missing from the official endorsement of the dam. On the walls were photographs of state leaders visiting the site and congratulating the engineers on their work. But there was no picture of Hu Jintao.

Neither he nor Premier Wen Jiabao, a trained geologist, attended the dam’s completion ceremony in 2006. This raised suspicions that President Water and Premier Earth were distancing themselves from a project that was quickly proving a disaster for the river and the land.

As the water rose, the weight of the reservoir began triggering landslides and deadly waves.
²³
Such was the concern that the government had to postpone plans to raise the level of the reservoir to its maximum height.
²⁴
The water quality deteriorated as the river became less able to flush garbage and algae out of its system. Domestic newspapers said the pollution was “cancerous” and a threat to marine life and drinking supplies in 186 cities. The state news agency Xinhua warned that the Three Gorges could become an “environmental catastrophe” unless remedial action was taken. Alarm bells rang even louder when the State Council’s point man on the project, Wang Xiaofeng, spoke of “hidden dangers” that could cause pollution, landslides, and “other geological disasters.”
²⁵

This represented a volte-face by the establishment. Until then, such grim warnings had come only from academia and the NGO sector. Historically, the government’s usual response to pollution and disaster was to cover up bad news and arrest the critics.

No one knew that better than Dai Qing, one of China’s most indomitable environmentalists, who was imprisoned for ten months after publishing a searing criticism of the Three Gorges Dam in 1989. After her release, she continued to be an influential critic of the government’s water-management policies and won the Goldman Environmental Prize in 1993.
²⁶

Dai told me China had a long history of building dangerous dams and then covering up the consequences. Construction surged in the 1950s. Initially, there was a debate between Taoist and Confucian dam builders. The Taoists preferred to use low levees and the natural flow of the water, as in Dujiangyan, while the Confucians wanted high dikes and other big projects to control the course of rivers.
²⁷
Mao, as we have seen, threw his support behind the latter’s megaprojects.

In a fury of dam building at the start of the Great Leap Forward, Dai said, 580 million cubic tons of earth was shifted for barriers and irrigation channels. In one insane year, 1958, that will come up again and again in this book, the amount of earth moved for hydro projects was more than double that in the whole of the previous decade.
²⁸

Scrappily built and inadequately checked, many collapsed with deadly consequences. The first big dam to go was the Fushan, which lasted just four months before bursting and drowning 10,000 people downstream. By 1980, 2,796 dams had failed with a combined death toll of 240,000. This was not made public until many years after.

But the problems caused by haste, vanity, and secrecy remain. “The crap from that era has not yet been cleaned up,” the former chief engineer of the Water Resources Bureau of Henan Province, Ma Shoulong, told Dai. The year 1958 may have been exceptional, but China remains a country of massive and often reckless hydro ambitions.

The biggest of them is another megascheme approved by Mao, the South-North Water Diversion Project.
²⁹
More than twice as expensive as the Three Gorges Dam and three times longer than the railway to Tibet, the fifty-year, 450-billion-yuan project aims to divert water along three channels—each nearly 1,000 kilometers long—from the moist Yangtze basin up to the dry lands north of the Yellow River. It is an emergency
operation: a transfusion of water to an area dying of thirst. In European terms, it is like using the Rhône to save the Rhine. In America, imagine the Mississippi being tapped to rescue the Colorado.

The operation is staggeringly complex, expensive, politically difficult, and environmentally perilous.
³⁰
There is no certainty it will save the Yellow River, which has been massively overexploited and polluted for decades. And there is every chance that it could hasten the decline of the Yangtze.

The scheme has been dogged by delays and cost overruns that set it back at least four years. What should have been the easiest section, the east leg, was supposed to have been on tap in Beijing in time for the 2008 Olympics. Planners originally hoped to use the 1,400-year-old Grand Canal that already ran from south to north, but its waters were too contaminated by toxins, urban waste, and chemical fertilizer. The designers earmarked more than half the budget for that section on water treatment. But the filthy green slime proved almost untreatable. In 2007, 300 hectares of wheat died in the fields after local farmers used the canal for irrigation.
³¹
More than a year after the Olympics, Beijing had yet to receive a drop of water from the east route and it was unsure when it ever would.

Instead, the government rushed ahead on the central route from the Han, another tributary of the Yangtze. Engineers from the 16th Bureau of the China Railway Construction Group were dispatched to start on the most complex section, a 4.1-kilometer tunnel under the Yellow River. From there, a long expanse of farmland was cleared for the channel that is one day expected to carry 9.5 billion cubic meters of water every year to slake the thirst of Beijing and nineteen other cities in the north. But this leg too has proved far more expensive than expected. As well as enormous pipes and aqueducts, northern plumbing systems are having to be adapted for the high levels of acidity in the southern water.

The social impact is likely to be felt most by the 300,000 people who will be forced to resettle, most of whom live in an area that will be flooded when the Danjiangkou Dam is completed at the southernmost point of the route. Even those who will remain in their homes fear the easing of the north’s water shortage will worsen the south’s problems of pollution, sedimentation, and drought.
³²

The challenges facing the western leg have proved more difficult still. Under the government’s blueprint, 17 billion cubic meters of water were supposed to be pumped from the Jinsha, the headwater of the Yangtze, at
an altitude of 4,100 meters on the Tibetan Plateau, down to the Yellow River. Crossing these highlands will require pumping stations and tunnels. It will be hugely expensive and politically difficult.
³³

Fears arose that it could prove a megaproject too far, even for China. The plans submitted by the Ministry of Water Resources were postponed indefinitely. Influential supporters of the scheme started to backtrack.
³⁴
Downstream provinces, including the major industrial centers of Nanjing, Wuhan, and Shanghai, worried that they would end up dry because the Yangtze was already showing the strains of overuse, overdamming, climate change, and pollution. In 2006, several dozen scientists in Sichuan published a collection of memorandums that called into question the feasibility and desirability of the western leg.

The debate suggested the Maoist approach to development—”think big, move fast and worry about the consequences later”—was belatedly being called into question.
³⁵
Even the most audacious Chinese engineering visionaries were discovering limits to what man could or should attempt in the campaign to conquer the natural world. The new big idea was “think small,” or so it seemed. For the environment, that was good news. But for at least one member of the old guard, it was lamentable.

Guo Kai was one of the last survivors of the Yugong Yishan, mountain-moving generation of Maoists. While the rest of humanity looked on in awe at the grand hydroengineering schemes of modern China, the retired general told me he was frustrated by the nation’s lack of ambition.

I met Guo in a tea shop. He looked very much the pensioner, dressed in thick layers of vests, shirts, and cardigans as he explained his world-transforming plan to me. Along with his chief collaborator, Li Ling, another retired officer from the second artillery division, we talked over glasses of green tea that were too hot to hold, much like their proposal has been since it was first mooted in 1976.