FEATURE

By Foster Stockwell

THREE GORGES DAMSuccess or Disaster?

I.n 1944, the TVA's first directot, David Iilienthalwrote his book T\''Afrennessee Valley Authority):"Democracy on the March." In the preface,Iilienthai stated:

There is almost nothing, however fantastic, that(given competent organization) a team of engineers,scientists, and administrators cannot do today. Im-possible things can be done, are being done, in thismid-tu^entieth century.

The one American achievement which has

most appealed to Chinese observers as an

yimerican model for China to follow is the

regional development program of the Tennes-

see Valley Authority. TVA mahs sense in

China. The use of public funds for big public

works and water control, the government and

the individual dti^n cooperating in the

application of modern technology to the

andent problems of the soil, the state helping

the small man to help himself—this is the

most clear-cut democratic ideal in Asia.

—John Fairbanks,

The United States and China, 1948

The first time I traveled along the Yangtze«(known in Chitia as the Changjiang, or long liver) Iwas only five years old and the houseboat carr)'Íngmy family and the boatmen was being dragged upriver at the end of a long rope pulled by manyshirtless coolies who carefully trod a tiny patli cutinto the cliff face at the side of the river. The pathwas centuries old and had been used by such ropepullers many thousands of times. Each night ourboat docked at one of tlie towns near the river bankso that we could be safe from bandits who operatedat night along the course of the ri\'̂ er. Our journeyfrom Hankow to Chongqing took a number of days.

Tliere are only a handful of houseboats and sam-pans on this river today. Steamships now take tour-

ists and busi-ness peoplethrough theY a n g t z eGoiges. One ofthe benefits ofthis moderniza-tion in shippingis the savTng oflives for manyrope pullers,who previoush'often slippedfrom the pathduring rain-storms and fellinto the riverhundreds offeet below.

China haseven completeda dam acrossthe Yangtze—the ThreeGorges Dam—

Three Gorges Dam, China(30 44'18" North, 1 i r i6 '27"East), crosses the YangtzeRiver at Sandouping, Yichang,Hubei province, China. Thedam's name refers to the ma-jestic limestone cliffs of theQutang, Wu, and Xilinggorges, which stretch forabout 200 kilometers (124miles) from Fengjie, in Sichunprovince, to Yichang, in Hubeiprovince, in China's heart-land. The Yangtze is the long-est river in Asia and the thirdlongest in the world, running6,211 kilometers (3,860miles) from Qinghai Provincein the Tibetan Plateau to theEast China Sea near Shang-hai. The river's watershed ismassive, spanning 1,722,155sq.km (1,070,147 sq. miles)with nearly 400 million inhab-itants.

the largest suchdam in the world. It is a massive engineenng achieve-ment. But tlierc are many critics in the United Statesand elsewhere who say that China was foolish tobuild this dam and that it is bound to lead to majordisasters. They believe tliat this dam, like all otherbig dams around the world constructed lA t̂hin dielast fift}' years, will soon display unanticipated prob-lems.

The Yangtze is the longest river in Asia and thethird longest in the world after the Nile and Ama-zon. It gets its start in one the large glaciers locatedin the Kunlung« Mountains of Tibet, 16,000 feet

See NAME INDEX for Names in Chinese on Inside Back Cover 1 1

above sea level. This height causes the river waterto flow rapidly for most of its 3,434-mile length,and the flow brings with it large amounts of sedi-ment and even big rocks as moves toward the ocean.Much of the city of Shanghai, in fact, stands on thedelta that has been created by the river sediment.

Interestingly, two other major rivers of Asia startat the same source as the Yangtze: the Mekong»and the Salween«. All three rivers follow much thesaiTie route as they flow southwards from the gla-cier, but instead of joining together they suddenlydiverge. The Mekong twists and turns as it goessouthward through Vietnam and into the SouthChina Sea. The Salween, by a series of jerks to thewest, flows southwards to reach the Bay of Bengal.The Yangtze, some thousand miles downstream,suddenly executes a remarkable hairpin bend as thewater slams head-on into a limestone mountain thatforces the course of the river water to turn east andflow across central China all the way to the PacificOcean. The river effectively divides China northand south. Local mythology has it that winterweather north of the river is cold, wliile the weathersouth of the river is warm. Thus hotels north of theriver will likely have central heating while those justa mile or so on the other side have none.

The Yangtze has more tlian 700 tributaries anddie quantity of its water is so enormous that it hasflooded disastrously more than 1,000 times, includ-ing once in 1931 when an estimated 145,000 peoplewere drowned. Such flooding usually happens in latesummer as a result of monsoon rains and mountainsnow-melt. The 1931 flood covered 186 countiesand cities. A flood in 1998, while the dam was un-der construction, lasted from the middle of June tothe beginning of September.

To tame the river and control its flooding. Dr.Sun Yat Sen« suggested in 1919 that a dam beerected across the Yangtze. However it was not until1994 diat the Three Gorges Dam project was actu-ally started. Workers numbering betu'een 20,000 and30,000 have been working in sliifts on a 24-hourschedule ever since. A total of 1.3 million peoplehave been relocated in new homes to make way forthe dam and its huge reservoin

The Three Gorges Dam stands at Sandouping«in Hubei« Province. It has become a symbol ofChinas modernization efforts. It is 7,575 feet long

and 594 feet high. The reservoir behind the damextends 410 miles up the Yangtze (about half thelength of CaUfornia) to the far inland city ofChongqing. The dam includes ship locks to lift largeocean-going freighters from the lower side of thedam to the upper so that these ships can travel allthe way from Shanghai to Chongqing».

The river channel had to be deepened at variousplaces to accommodate such ships. The dam alsohas some 32 main electric generators, each with acapacity of 700 MW, that produce a generating ca-pacity' of 22,500 \iW

Engineers in the West tend to view dams mainlyas electricity generating structures. They say thatChina would have been much wiser to put manysmall dams along the tributaries of the Yangtze in-stead of constructing just one big structure. Manysmaller units, they say, would produce just as muchelectricity' for China as the huge I'hree Gorges Dam.This, of course, is true but electricity- production isa secondary attribute of this dam. The main reasonfor its construction is flood control. And so far thisis succeeding.

Anodicr aim is to divert water to the parchedareas of nortli Cliina. In October 2009 tlie Chineseworkers began to construct three canals that willeventually carrj- water fcom southern, central, andwestern China to the arid north. One branch willstretch from the Yangtze River all the way to Beijing.To accomplish this diversion, 330,000 more peoplein Henan» and Hubei provinces are being movedfrom their homes near the Danjiangkou« reservoirand resetfled elsewhere, lliis is where the reservoiris being enlarged and where a sluice is being built inorder to divert the water û:om the Yangtze and itstributaries.

Critics say that even when the three routes arecompleted the diversion still will not satisfy north-ern China's water demands. And they say the mas-sive project will likely cause all sorts of environ-mental damage, not the least of which will be a püeup of huge amounts of silt as the water flow bringsthis sediment to the dam. However the Chineseengineers say tliey have solved this problem by in-stalling a system that flushes out die silt as it accu-mulates.

Filling of the Danjiangkou reservoir with waterhas not only covered farms and some villages, it

1 2 CHINESE AMERICAN FORUM - Volume XXV, No. 3 - January 2010

has also drowned many ancient temples, grave sites,and other cultural relics that could not be moved orrelocated It is, of course, impossible to estimatehow much of a loss this may be to China's histori-cal record, but clearly the Chinese have decided thatsaving the lives of fiood victims and creating a shipnavigation system that extends from the interior ofthe country to the Pacific coast is far more impor-tant than protecting some ancient artifacts.

The families that have been relocated or are stillbeing moved have been allocated homes and farm-land in newly-built and more substantial villages.They have also been given annual subsidies of about$88. But there have been complaints that farmersare being offered less than half the land tliey for-merly cultivated. And many of these farmers areunhappy with the new arrangement. It is always dif-ficult to move to new surroundings and especiallyso when one's family for centuries past lived in thesame place and farmed the same land.

Thus only time will tell how wise it was to de-cide to build the Three Gorges Dam. But as thectitics wait for what they are sure will be a major

disaster, big Chinese ships move up and down theYangtze river transporting trucks and heavy indus-trial macliinerj' from Chongqing out into the PacificOcean and then on to many parts of the world.

# # #Foster Stockwell grew up in China (12years) first in

Fujii3n0 Province and then in St^chuan* Promnce (áty

of Chengdum) as the son of American missionaries. He

returned to the U.S. fust before the Japanese attacked

Pearl Harbor in 1941. After completing college, he

became a writer and editor working for various maga-

::jnes, newspaper, and book publishers. For 20 years he

was a senior editor for World Book Encyclopedia in

Chicago, and for 10 years he was the publishing director

for China Books and Periodicals in San Francisco. Air

Stockwell has written six published books, two of which

are about China (Ueligion in China Today, and

Westerners in ChinaJ and has traveled to China more

than 15 times over the past 25years, working as a

publisher and consultant for the Foreign languages Press

in Beijing. He is now retired and living in Des Aíoines,

\Fashington.

E D I T O R ' S N O T E :The dam was originally envisioned by SunYat-sen in The International Development ofChina, in 1919. It was stated that the con-struction of a dam capable of generating 30million horsepower (22,371 MW of electricity)was possible downstream of the Three Gorges.In 1932, the Nationalist government, led byChiang Kai-shek, began preliminary work onplans for a dam in the Three Gorges.Then, in 1939, Japanese military forces occu-pied Yichang and surveyed the area. A design,the Otani plan, was completed for the dam inanticipation of a Japanese victory over China.In 1944, involvement from the United Statesbegan when the then Bureau of Reclamation chief designing engineer, John L. Savage surveyed thearea and drew up a dam proposal for the 'Yangtze River Project'. . Around 54 Chinese engineers weresent to the U.S. for training. Some exploration, survey, economic study, and design work was done,but the government, in the midst of the Chinese Civil War, halted work in 1947,During the 1980s, plans were revived. The dam was approved by the National People's Congress in1992.The construction started on December 14, 1994. The dam was expected to be fully operational in2009, but due to additional projects such as the underground power plant with six additional genera-tors, and due to the complexity of the ship lift, the dam is not expected to become fully operationaluntil about 2011. The dam raised the water level the third time to 172.5 meters by the end of 2008.

See NAME INDEX for Names in Chinese on Inside Back Cover 1 3

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