The River at the Center of the World: A Journey Up the Yangtze

by Simon Winchester

  Then in the 1940s along came John Savage, the American dam builder from Denver who professed himself to have ‘fallen in love with the Yangtze's water resources' – not with the Yangtze, but with its water resources – ‘at first sight’. Savage was with the Reclamation Bureau; he was a legendary figure in American dam building and his involvement in those early discussions was a harbinger of the intimate involvement of Americans in the scheme.

  He suggested six sites, the highest just a few hundred yards down from the lower end of the Xiling Gorge, the lowest at a point some nine miles above Yichang. The bureau drew detailed designs for a long concrete barrage with a series of ship locks that would allow navigation beyond the dam – a critical aspect of a project that, of course, was designed specifically to block what was a very busy shipping route. In 1947 a team of fifty Americans worked for a while at one of the sites, only too aware that the Nationalist government that had hired them was, in all likelihood, not long for this world: Mao's Communists were gathering strength day by day. The cancellation of the project later in that same year came as no surprise to the outsiders: the torch would have to be passed to a new government, all suspected – and it was by no means sure that Mao, once he had gained power, would be as committed to the Three Gorges dam as his fervent ideological opponents had been.

  It was a little later that John Hersey, the China-born journalist and writer who produced what remains the most lyrical of all books about the Yangtze, A Single Pebble, offered his vision of the project to the outside world. The hero of his novella is a young American engineer who is taken on one of the great trading junks, a ma-yang zi, to survey the Three Gorges and ‘to see whether it would make sense for my company to sell the Chinese government a vast power project in the river's famous Gorges’.

  The story's theme is the life of the trackers, the stoic and tenacious men who, with bare feet, broad shoulders and bamboo hawsers, pull his junk up through the Gorges' rapids. But more than once the narrator imagines his beloved dam, with the kind of wild rhetorical flourishings of which Mao Zedong would have eagerly approved:

  The second evening in Witches' Mountain Gorge, just after we had spar-moored for the night against a big boulder in a quiet cove, and while most of the trackers rested on their haunches on the rocks ashore, sipping tea, I sat alone on the conning deck watching blossoms of sunset unfold on the edges of the small delicate misty shrub-like clouds that stood naturalized in the visible sky over the gorge upstream – when all at once I imagined a dam.

  There it was! Between those two sheer cliffs that tightened the gorge a half-mile upstream, there leaped up in my imagination a beautiful concrete straight-gravity dam which raised the upstream water five hundred feet; much of its curving span was capped by an overflow spillway controlled by drum gates and tube valve outlets; and a huge hydraulic jump apron designed to pass unprecedented volumes of water stood ready to protect both the dam and the lower countryside against the freshets of springtime. Ingenious lift-locks at either side carried junks up and down on truly hydraulic elevators. The power plant was entirely embedded in the cliffs on both sides of the river. The strength of the Great River, rushing through the diversion tunnels that had been used for the construction of the dam, and through other great tubes and shafts bored through solid rock, and finally into the whirling gills of nearly a hundred power units, created a vast hum of ten million kilowatts of light and warmth and progress.

  The Communists loved the idea as keenly as did John Hersey's narrator, and as keenly as had their Nationalist predecessors. Once they had their house in some kind of order they set up committees to consider the various sites. Drilling rigs went up, core samples were taken – and in 1959 the committee said it would choose one of three sites, all near Sandouping. A year later the uppermost of those three, a narrowing of the river close to a low island called Zhongbao, was finally chosen.

  Except it turned out not to be final at all. The military promptly weighed in, and a committee of generals decided that at Sandouping the river was still far too wide to allow for adequate air defence. Since a gigantic dam like this would be a prime site for terrorist or foreign attack, good defence was of prime concern. So the Chinese government went back to look for more sites – and then, in another corner, the Cultural Revolution began. The plans for the dam were, on the one hand, disrupted; and on the other hand, they became embroiled in politics – the dam was seen by Mao and his allies as perfect propaganda for the promotion of his authority and power.

  Mao's poem ‘Swimming' envisaged the structure in two lines of verse, lines that helped invest the project with an almost mythic importance. Building a dam across the Yangtze was in many ways like swimming across the Yangtze – it was a means of demonstrating man's supremacy, and Mao's supremacy, and the Party's supremacy, over the Chinese landscape, as well as being the realization of the worthiest of ambitions. Come the late 1950s, every cadre in the land had started to see in Three Gorges Dam a perpetual memorial to the greatness of the Great Helmsman. If there were any doubts, any concerns about the harsh realities of the dam's construction, of its likely costs, its long-term impact, its risks, its practical disadvantages – all were swept away under the relentless imperium of dogma and fanatic belief.

  In the midst of the political chaos of the time there came news of yet more potential sites, and site selection took on as frantic a tempo as that of the Great Leap Forward. The project began to lose contact with reality. Someone piped up to claim he liked a hitherto unmentioned place called Shipai; a committee thought that this was indeed a good place, and for a while all effort was devoted to looking at Shipai. But three years later another committee rejected it: unstable geology. Other new names joined the list: Huanglingmiao, Meirentuo, the Nanjin Pass. Two years later still came the recommendation that the dam be built at yet another place, this one called Taipingxi: on this site the builders would need less concrete, but there would have to be more costly excavation. Taipingxi the generals also liked: they could set up lots of anti-aircraft guns here, they reported. But the excavation costs scuppered this choice a year or so later.

  Back and forth matters went, committee after committee doing and then undoing the work of one another. But finally, once Mao was dead and the Cultural Revolution safely buried and half-forgotten and the Gang of Four in prison, a more serious-minded set of committees – a set that was apolitical, to the extent that in Communist China any government body can be apolitical – made its once-and-for-all-decision. It came via a terse report from the Ministry of Water Conservancy to the State Council in November 1979: whatever the shortcomings of the site for air defence, the original place that had been suggested fifty years before, Sandouping, was where the Three Gorges Dam should and would in fact be built. Now there was merely the question of how big the dam should be, and whether all those who mattered in China and beyond would agree to build it.

  The international community was at first excited. The Americans – firms and organizations like Bechtel, the US Army Corps of Engineers, Merrill Lynch, and Coopers and Lybrand, all of whom have expertise in huge capital projects – formed a technical liaison group. The Canadians gave money and said they would be involved. The World Bank began to research the scheme. Sweden and Japan talked openly of pumping in funds. A technical debate began, raging throughout the world's dam-building community.

  The question of how high – how tall the dam, and how high the level of the reservoir behind it – has been bitterly debated for years. A high reservoir level – anything more than 500 feet – mean that more electricity could be generated and deep-draught ships could be accommodated upstream of the dam: but it also would mean that the dam wall itself would have to be taller, and that more people living beside the river would have to be moved as their towns, villages and houses flooded. There would also be little slack available to be taken up in the event of a flood. A lower reservoir level, on the other hand, would cost less – fewer people would need to be moved, and the dam could be lower; but wit
h a proposed low level of around 450 feet, rapids would begin to appear in the upper part of the Gorges, big ships would have difficulty navigating there, and there would be less power potential for the electricity distributors to sell.

  A decision was finally announced by Li Peng, the Chinese prime minister, in 1992: the ‘normal pool level’, as it is known, of the proposed Three Gorges Dam would be a stunning 573 feet.* The dam would be 610 feet high, and it would be 6864 feet from one side to the other – more than five times as wide as the huge Hoover Dam. The Aswan Dam in Egypt is twice as long and half as high – but it is a rock-fill dam, and not, like this, fashioned from concrete and iron. The huge wall proposed for the Yangtze would swallow up 26 million tons of concrete and 250,000 tons of steel and it would create a 600-square-mile lake stretching back from the dam for some 372 miles – backing water up in the Gorges and across nearly half of the Red Basin to a point considerably past the city of Chongqing.

  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.