Jan 8 2006
EVEN in the biting cold, thousands of tourists still take the treacherous daily journey through the mountains from Lijiang to see the Tiger Leaping Gorge, one of China's most renowned attractions. However, the entire site could vanish within a few years.
Anyone who has seen the household garbage and industrial debris that floats across the downstream sections of the Yangtze River would be surprised by its pristine upper reaches, where the Tiger Leaping Gorge is located, but a series of dams and reservoirs could soon shatter the fragile biodiversity of the region.
At what is described as the "first bend" of the river in southwestern China's Yunnan Province, the Yangtze is an almost perfect reflection of the fields, forests and blue skies that overlook it.
But the country's power companies are already drawing up plans that will change the area forever.
"Lijiang's economy will depend mainly on tourism, but our industry is hydropower," said Wang Juqiu, the vice-head of the local Development and Reform Commission.
The Yangtze River - known upstream as the Jinsha, or the Golden Sands - emerges from the Himalayas and cuts through the sandy banks of northern Yunnan Province before surging through the rich agricultural regions of central China and finally completing its journey in Shanghai on the eastern coast.
On its way, as well as posing a perennial flood threat during the summer months, the river also supports thousands of heavy industrial facilities, provides irrigation for countless rural communities and powers the world's biggest hydroelectric plant at the Three Gorges.
As it sweeps across the frail banks, it picks up junk, soil and even dead livestock along the way, and the fertilizer run-offs and chemical discharges have already done untold damage to the river's ecosystem. The most recent victim of human development was the baiji (white fin) dolphin, native to the Yangtze River and declared extinct in November.
Closer to its source, things remain more or less intact, but national government officials say that damming the river will not only provide a significant volume of electricity but will also one cut off one the biggest sources of silt for the flagship Three Gorges Project further downstream.
Opponents say the new dams, built in part to improve operations at the Three Gorges, will merely divert the silt problem to more vulnerable ecologies further upstream. They also suggest that the error of the Three Gorges is being compounded by errors that will prove to be even more destructive.
Once the new dams are put in place over the next decade, much of the region will be unrecognizable. After similar projects elsewhere in the province, local residents are concerned about the uncertainties of relocation and the rates of compensation. Experts, meanwhile, worry about the effects on the region's unique natural and cultural heritage.
Officials with the Lijiang government insisted that all the projects are rigorously checked in order to ensure that they are viable and cause only minimal damage to local heritage and ecology.
"Previously, the projects were conducted in a ramshackle way with no regard to the environment," said Wang Juqiu. "Now, construction must be civilized. The conditions are very strict. It must all be done according to strict plans."
However, opponents say that legal procedures - including those stipulated by the Environmental Impact Assessment Law - are not being respected.
"The large-scale development of hydropower in Yunnan will certainly cause the loss of biodiversity," said Yu Xiaogang, the award-winning local campaigner and founder of the NGO, Green Watershed. "You can say that the nature reserves and heritage zones are the heritage of the entire country, even the entire world. But by now, the local governments and hydropower developers have cooperated to damage this heritage."
The Tiger Leaping Gorge - in the neighboring prefecture now known as Shangri-La - is the most infamous of the new facilities. The popular tourist site is expected to be inundated within a decade, and activists are concerned that despite new laws aimed at improving transparency and allowing local citizens to participate in the decision-making process, the project is slowly inching forward in conditions of utmost secrecy.
The central government insists that legislation such as the Environmental Impact Assessment Law - as well as a new set of regulations aimed at improving compensation payments to migrants - will allow such projects to proceed more smoothly.
Yu Xiaogang, however, says that local governments have different priorities, and they are restricting access to information.
"One the one hand, you say that you have protected something very well," Yu said, "but on the other, you say that you don't permit us to look at it. It is like a matchmaker saying that this girl is beautiful and guaranteeing that you will like her, and when you ask the matchmaker for a photograph he says no, I won't let you look."
Despite claims that the planning has been rigorous, no environmental impact assessment report on the Tiger Leaping Gorge has been published, and there are no plans to ascertain what its social impact will be, Yu said.
Local government officials refused to discuss the project, and although it has been tentatively scheduled to begin construction "before 2009," no specific launch date has yet been announced. However, special "relocation bureaus" have already been set up in nearby villages to facilitate the move of local people.
Yu Xiaogang said that the local government, despite its heavy-handed rhetoric about protecting the environment, is motivated largely by the increases in tax revenues that will arise once the new plants are completed.
The realities of local government finance mean that the inevitable conflict between conservation and development is tilted in favor of the latter, he believes.
The local governments in question are trying to find the revenues to support the growth of the tourist industry, and to help protect the designated heritage sites that draw sightseers to the region. The greater demand for electricity means that the province has had to make difficult choices, according to Luo Jinrong, the vice-chairman of the Lijiang People's Congress.
Yu Xiaogang disagrees, however. The new wave of hydropower construction is not aimed at satisfying growing provincial demand or at providing the infrastructure to support the tourism, but is part of Yunnan's onerous commitments to the national West-East Power Transmission Project. Yunnan is also committed to deliver power across its southwestern border to Burma, Thailand and Vietnam.
"As far as the demand for hydropower is concerned, we should look at it from a local point of view," said Yu. "The main demand for hydropower in Yunnan is not from Yunnan, but from Guangdong and Southeast Asian countries. Yunnan is already supplying power to Vietnam and Burma, and in the future also wants to supply Thailand."
"If Yunnan's electricity is consumed locally, the capacity is already enough, and can satisfy Yunnan's economic development," Yu said, "and we don't need to develop any more hydropower. Demand from Yunnan itself is only a very small part of the total."
And the problem is that hydropower is not actually a reliable replacement for coal-fired generators, Yu believes. Hydropower is seasonal, he said, but the province is committed to supplying other regions even during the dry winter. When the currents of its rivers are not strong enough to maintain the turbines at full capacity, the province will have to fall back on its thermal power plants.
"The more hydropower has been developed, the more thermal power is developed," he said. "Yunnan has also had to build a lot of thermal power capacity in order to supplement hydropower during the dry season."
"For example, the environmental impact assessment report of the Dachaoshan hydropower station, which was supported by the Asia Development Bank, said that once the power was delivered to Kunming, the thermal power plants in Kunming could be closed, and Kunming's environmental pollution could be reduced by a great amount.
"In fact, after the power was delivered to Kunming, it has not replaced thermal power, and those thermal power plants have not been closed," Yu said. "Actually, they have needed to produce even more power."
The arguments about the right balance between development and conservation - as well as the costs and benefits of taking part in the West-East Power Transmission project - are familiar throughout western China. Far from the well-beaten tourist track, hydropower migrants in Guizhou, Guangxi, Sichuan and Ningxia have all struggled after their home villages were submerged.
At the Tiger Leaping Gorge, however, activists are emboldened by the fact that the region is a noted tourist attraction, and they are also encouraged by the central government's about-turn on the development of the Nu (Salween) River further west.
The Nu River hydropower projects have been suspended for two years and condemned as "unscientific" by the Minister of Water Resources, Wang Shucheng.
But it was the international status of the Nu River that compelled the government to be more circumspect, with downstream communities in Burma and Vietnam also likely to be affected by hydropower development.
The Tiger Leaping Gorge is afforded no such protection, Yu said.
The power of the Yangtze River is amply demonstrated by the waves that crash against the rocks at the Tiger Leaping Gorge, and it is easy to see why the authorities want to harness it. As they do so, however, the outcrops will be lost under a reservoir covering the entire site.
As a tour guide at the gorge said, "We don't know when it will happen. We are all just waiting."
