The River at the Centre of the World

by Simon Winchester

  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.

  Li Peng is a Russian-trained electrical engineer. His determination to have the dam built, come what may, stems both from that fact – his interest in capital projects, the bigger the better – and from his hope that his regime will leave a memorial to Mao and Maoism (and to himself, of course) that will last a thousand years. ‘The pet project of the red emperor' is how Dai Qing has styled the dam, and both Li and Deng Xiaoping have made it clear they expect their engineers to erect a structure of enduring nobility. But almost all of the criticism of the dam is based on the assumption that it will not last for a fraction of the anticipated time, and that its effects will be by turn minimally beneficial and a wholesale environmental disaster – indeed, that it may turn out to be a catastrophe waiting to happen. The debate can be a highly technical one; but in essence the critics – Chinese and Western both – have homed in since the start of construction on a small number of what they regard as dangerous weaknesses in the project.

  The sedimentation problem, the first of these perceived weaknesses, is what critics insist will eventually kill the dam, and it will do so by throttling it to death. Five hundred and thirty million tons of sand and pebbles wash down through the Gorges every year, and the chances are that a large proportion of this material will settle at the base of the dam's retaining wall. Most of this can probably be flushed out – dams have devices that regularly do this, and a most spectacular sight it is when it happens.

  But the Yangtze, hydrologists say, throws down far more than mere sand and pebbles. Huge cobbles and boulders are rolled down in this peculiarly violent current, and these, it is believed, will settle unflushably at the base of the dam, binding the sand together and clogging an ever rising mass of detritus as securely as if it were setting cement. The only way of keeping the silt moving is to keep the reservoir level low and the waterflow through the dam's gateways as rapid as possible. The power lobby and the shipping lobby won't hear of this: they want a high water level and a low flow-through rate so that they have maximum power potential and maximum ship draught. Li Peng is sympathetic to their views, and believes the sedimentation problems, if they exist, are manageable.

  The sediment, opponents argue, will cause other and quite different problems as far away as Chongqing – the city that the dam builders say will become a major inland port. The reservoir waters will be flowing very slowly where they lap against the hills of Chongqing, and because of this they will dump silt precisely where the river presently sweeps it away.* The harbour at Chongqing, initially made deeper by the flooding, will swiftly become shallow again because of the new situation. The big ships that are expected to use the port will be unable to, unless there is constant and expensive dredging. The dam will thus have contributed, as its critics say it will in many areas, to creating the very problems it seeks to alleviate. In this specific case, it will turn Chongqing, planned as a major centre of shipping trade, into a nonport of even less significance than it is today.

  Then there is the matter of safety. Dams break – and although not much has been said about dam bursts in China itself, it i
s now known that at least the two mentioned have broken, with disastrous results, because of either substandard construction or poor design. The Banqiao, an earthen dam on a tributary of the Lower Yangtze in Henan province, was long regarded as ‘an iron dam – one that can never fail’. Torrential rainstorms associated with a typhoon in August 1975 forced the reservoir behind the dam to rise nearly seven feet overnight, and the unexpectedly heavy siltation at the base of the structure prevented the water from flowing away, even when the sluice gates were wide open. Early on the third evening of the storm – a ‘two-thousand-year storm’, the weather bureau said – the water finally overtopped the dam, and the vast structure promptly burst: the resulting lake stretched for thirty miles downstream, and whole villages were inundated in seconds. Various human rights organizations have suggested that almost a quarter of a million people died. The Chinese said nothing about the catastrophe: news seeped out only in 1994, nearly twenty years after the event.

  Is the Three Gorges area geologically stable enough? And might not the 370-mile lake that would be formed upstream of the dam with thousands of millions of tons of water pressing down on the fault-splintered country-rock – change the geostatic balance of the area to such an extent that earthquakes might be generated? Might there not be landslips – might not the infamous Huangla Stone, 140 million cubic feet of limestone a few miles upstream of the dam, detach itself from the towering cliffs and crash down into the lake, causing waves 250 feet high, which would surge over the dam, wreck its concrete lip and prompt the structure to crack, leak, buckle and perhaps burst? Earthquakes and landslips damage and destroy dams every bit as often as do flood-induced failures. The Chinese, it is thought, have been dangerously complacent about the seismic risks of this particular project.

  Then again, whether or not the Chinese are capable of building or siting big dams at all, there is the question of whether the Three Gorges Dam, so incredibly large a structure, might not become a target for foreign or domestic bombing or sabotage. Dams are inviting targets: Germany's Mohne and Eder Dams were bombed and breached by the British in the Second World War, causing massive flooding of the Ruhr valley. The Perucia Dam in Croatia was badly damaged by terrorist bombs in 1993. In the kind of bizarre twist that only the North Koreans could come up with, the Pyongyang government at one stage threatened to build a dam across their own Han River and then blow it up, so that the resulting surge would flood Seoul, the southern capital. The Damoclean vulnerability of dams can be made to work in all kinds of ways.*

  The Chinese are said to be taking extraordinary measures to prevent the Three Gorges Dam from ever being attacked. They are only too well aware of the demonic effect that as much as 400,000 cubic yards of water cascading unstoppably downward each second would have on nearby riverside cities like Yichang and Shashi, and perhaps even on more distant population centres like Wuhan and Jiujiang. The Chinese Air Force report on the poor defensibility of the Sandouping site was written twenty years ago; today there are plans to deploy some two divisions of soldiers in the immediate area of the dam site, to place guns and missile batteries at every vantage point and to organize a security net around the structure such that the most determined terrorist could not penetrate it. And if the dam were to be destroyed? Not to worry, say the propaganda leaflets sent out by the Yangtze Valley Planning Office, documents of startling complacency, ‘the dam would be capable of standing up to fairly powerful conventional weapons… but if it was attacked by nuclear weapons and totally destroyed, appropriate engineering and managerial measures would limit the damage caused by flooding.’ It is difficult to draw much comfort from these bland and hardly specific assurances.

  The human costs of the dam construction are enormous: the difficulties of moving 1,250,000 people who will have lived all their lives in riverside towns and villages of great antiquity – although also, it has to be said, of an almost universal great ugliness – are legion. Already there have been reports of unrest: in 1992, nearly 180 men and women from what was called the Democratic Youth Party in Kaixian country were reportedly taken away by police and charged with sabotage and counterrevolutionary activity, relating, it is said, to their opposition to the dam. They have not been heard of since.

  President Jiangs visit to the city of Jiujiang, hundreds of miles downstream, to plead for room for 200,000 people forced to become refugees was mirrored more recently by suggestions that displaced people might be sent – not asked to go, but sent; this is Communist China – to the miserable uplands of Xinjiang province, a thousand miles to the northwest. Xinjiang and Qinghai, where the Yangtze rises, are gulag country (the Chinese word for the reform-through-labour prisoner, laogai, is oddly similar to the Russian acronym). The Chinese government is planning a major cotton industry in the area, and advertises its benefits by saying, among other things, that a willing and able labour force of people moved from the flooded Yangtze valley ‘will shortly be available’.

  And then there are the flooded archaeological treasures; and then there is the soon-to-be-ruined environment; and there will be the destruction of the fishes and reptiles and riverine mammals whose normal lifestyle includes using the whole of the lower and middle Yangtze for their spawning and breeding – the near extinct baiji and the similarly almost gone Yangtze alligator, the finless porpoise, the Chinese sturgeon, and the Siberian cranes that nest on Poyang Lake. All are now under threat, and the Chinese, except for setting up a couple of underfunded ‘research establishments' to assuage the most vocally expressed fears from outside, appear to do little, and seem utterly careless of their fate.

  A dam that will cost perhaps as much as $36 billion, generating electricity that will have cost $2000 for every kilowatt of capacity - how can the Chinese afford it? And how can an international community bring itself to support or take part in the construction of an outdated monster of such low efficiency, of such great potential danger, of so short a potential life, with such highly questionable economics, and so fraught with severely negative human and environmental implications? Only by getting to Yichang itself, and by seeing the site, could answers to such questions begin to emerge.

  We landed forty minutes later at an airport of an insignificance quite equal to the one in Wuhan. It too had biplanes lined up, and here, in a bucolic addition to the scene, a herd of cattle were grazing on the apron.* But I was charmed, now that we had survived the flight: there were dandelions and cosmos flowers in the grass, and the aerodrome had a look of wartime Oxford-shire – except that there was a terminal of worn brick, and inside it a man was asleep at a counter festooned with unsaleable wall hangings of tired-out tigers and smugly obese buddhas. A sign advertised the delights of the Sanxia Bingwan, the Three Gorges Hotel, and so there we went – not so much to savour its delights as to look for the droves of foreign firms who, I rather cynically suspected, would in spite of all the stated opposition now be flocking to Yichang to try to beg for work on the dam.

  The hotel, where we arrived late in the evening, was half-built or half-demolished, it was difficult to say which. It was huge, echoing, empty and awful. It had the advantage of being right on the riverbank, and my room looked out onto the passing ships, of which there were scores, all sounding their sirens as they passed. The hotel's one restaurant closed at eight, and there was no possibility of room service. There was a bar, but everything in its refrigerator turned out to be frozen solid, which made the child-waitress giggle. I was sorely in need of a drink, and found the idea of a solid one a little less than amusing.

  There were also said to be no foreigners in the hotel, except for a young woman from South Africa who was travelling through China on her own. She had the kind of small problem that wanderers find uniquely and, in retrospect only, delightfully Chinese.

  She had wanted to check out of the hotel after her night's stay, so that she might catch the night train to Xian. Her bill was three hundred yuan. She offered in payment a Visa traveller's cheque for $100, a type and denomination that the hotel's advertisi
ng claimed it would accept and that would in normal circumstances be exchanged for eight hundred yuan. The guest could pay her bill, and receive five hundred in change.

  But the cashier claimed not to have any money in his till at all: he would readily take the cheque in full settlement of the bill – but the girl would not receive any change. This would render her quite unable to pay for her train ticket, or anything else for that matter, until the next morning when – and if – she found a bank that would take a traveller's cheque. By the time I came across her she was on the point of wearily agreeing to do this – to give the hotel, in effect, an extra five hundred yuan for nothing.

  I weighed in, not minding my own business at all. I told her that she was being presented with a scam as old as the Chinese hills, and that providing she had a totally unsigned traveller's cheque – which she did – I would change it for her at the going rate. The hotel cashier, a rat-faced little man, looked on with fury as I did this. The South African woman walked off into the night offering undying gratitude. The rat man stared daggers at me, promising by his expression that the service in his hotel would now become for us, if such were possible, significantly worse.

  The doorman was a friendlier type. He said that all foreigners who came to Yichang these days – and there were a lot – stayed in the Taohualing Bingwan, the Peach Blossom Hotel. What is more, he said, ‘there are many beautiful girls there. Girls who like foreigners very much.’ We flagged down a cycle-ricksha and were at the front drive of the Peach Blossom ten minutes later.

  It was a hormonal assault course. Lily walked a dutiful fifty feet behind me for the purpose of the experiment, and as I marched through the gloom towards the brilliantly lit hotel entrance – flashing neon Welcomes and promises of Untold Charms Within – my sleeve was plucked and my shoulders were rubbed by ten, twelve young women, who dashed out from behind parked cars.