Three Gorges: Look Before You Li Peng
October 25 2007
LAST MONTH, state mouthpiece Xinhua threw the foreign media a bone by suggesting that the Chinese government had finally acknowledged the various problems caused by the construction of the Three Gorges Dam, including collapsing river banks, the build-up of sedimentation, the damage to the local ecosystem, the relocation of more than a million peasants, the increased seismicity and the risk of catastrophic flooding should the dam ever be blown up by an enemy state.
Xinhua was reporting from a conference in Wuhan in September, where a group of government officials and academics had gathered to discuss the impact of the dam on the local environment. Of course, when the report used the word "catastrophe" or "disaster" (zaihai in the original Chinese), the foreign media immediately jumped. While some observers, rather more plausibly, suggested that the statements might have emerged in order to persuade the central government to spend more money to repair some of the damage, others seemed to believe that the truth was finally out and that the current leadership was trying desperately to disown the project.
From the original Xinhua reports, it was not quite clear which fusty geologist or low-level official had used the word "disaster", but it was quickly implied in the foreign press that the Chinese government itself had admitted - "for the first time" - that the Dam had had a cataclysmic impact on the region. A few weeks later, ill-informed hacks were even asking ministers from the National Development and Reform Commission whether or not China was now considering dismantling the dam and cutting its losses, an unlikely proposition for a government anxious to stress 60 unbroken years of unstinting legitimacy, continuity and rectitude.
The underlying assumptions behind all this seemed to be that (a) the government had read a much-publicized report by the Wall Street Journal about the mounting problems at the Three Gorges (none of which were actually new), (b) the government responded to the report by organizing a conference in Wuhan, and (c) that the government somehow wanted it to be known that it agreed with foreign assessments about the Dam and that it no longer wanted to be associated with the "prestige" project.
Even if the domestic media hadn't actually been allowed to say so previously, the Chinese government has long since owned up to the environmental problems at the Three Gorges. The difference, in the case of the recent Xinhua report, is that reporters were finally allowed to acknowledge what everyone knew was the case, and that a longstanding news blackout on negative Three Gorges coverage had been lifted. One suspects that after the recent furore, that blackout is now back in place.
Officials have always made it very clear to foreign reporters that they have undertaken the project with their eyes open and with the best minds in the country working on all the various problems that might arise from the impoundment of a 600-kilometre reservoir and the construction of a 185-m dam in a region that was already vulnerable to problems like pollution, flooding and subsidence. Ruthless pragmatists to the last, they insist that, all in all, the benefits outweigh the costs and that everything, in the end, will be more or less fine.
Teams of hydrologists and engineers were working on the problem of silt, seismologists were monitoring earthquake risks, environmental experts were testing the water quality, and government officials were doing their utmost to ensure that policies and tracking systems were in place to avoid any serious disasters. They were building dykes to reinforce banks and protect monuments. Archeologists and architects were responsible for moving temples, brick by brick and rafter by rafter, away from the rising tide. Biologists had even set up a gene bank in order to preserve threatened local species. "Everything that you can possibly foresee has been foreseen by us and prepared for," a government spokesperson told us a few years ago.
The main issue - we thought at the time - was the way this crazy Promethean feat of precision engineering would tamper with the longstanding equilibria of the region. The disaster, should it come, would probably not be caused by a targeted bombing campaign by Chen Shui-Bian but would, more likely, be slow and cumulative, with the weight of the water constantly pushing against the tectonic plates, with the dirt and debris slowly accumulating on the reservoir bed, and with a massive sheet of static water drawing in more heat and submerging much of the region's CO2-consuming plant life.
Anyhow, there is certainly some truth to the theory that the Chinese government is currently trying to distance itself from the project. To the best of our knowledge, Hu Jintao has not even mentioned the Three Gorges during his Presidency. Premier Wen Jiabao, on the other hand, spent one visit to the region reprimanding local officials for failing to deal properly with the relocation of migrants. And no senior leader has endorsed the Three Gorges Dam since the retirement of Li Peng, the project's champion, in 2002.
Li Peng himself has published a memoir about the Three Gorges Dam in which he makes it very clear that the responsibility (or credit, as he describes it) lies not only with him, but with Deng Xiaoping. This was no doubt written to protect himself from any attempt by Hu or his successors to blame Li Peng for the Three Gorges (as well as the Tian'anmen Square crackdown). If I am the victim of any "reversal of verdicts", Li seemed to be saying, I will take Deng - the undisputed icon of China's post-Mao reforms and the major source of the Chinese Communist Party's legitimacy - with me.
In the meantime, the Three Gorges Project Corporation will continue to make profits, and the government officials responsible will continue to shrug their shoulders and reassure themselves that - if the worst comes to the worst - at least they can always blame Li Peng. In any case, the dam will stay, and the government will spend and spend in order to ensure that it more or less works out.
