August 29, 2006
RECENT COVERAGE of the drought in southwestern China brings to mind the idiot in the old Chinese fable who buries 300 pieces of silver in the ground and then hangs up a sign saying, "300 pieces of silver are not hidden here". No one, as far as we are aware, had really considered the possibility that the drought was the result of the impoundment of the Three Gorges Dam, but why has the state media taken so much time to dispel a theory that no one was entertaining?
Today's People's Daily cites an official with the Yangtze River Water Resources Commission as saying that the Yangtze depends on rainwater for its replenishment, and that a front of tropical high pressure along the river's upper reaches had severely diminished the amount of precipitation in the region, providing a perfectly innocent meteorological explanation for the current plight of Yunnan, Sichuan, Chongqing and Hebei.
It is not the first time the People's Daily has wheeled out an expert or two to burst this non-existent balloon of lies. On August 18, Dong Wenjie, the director of the China Meteorological Administration's National Climate Centre, was also telling the world (or that refined section of the world that pays attention to the organ of the Chinese Communist Party) that the high pressure, the typhoons in the east and general high temperatures were to blame, not, assuredly, the Three Gorges Dam.
Of course, some doom-mongers have said that the Dam, and especially, the reservoir, are likely to add to the effects of global warming in the region (a) by effectively creating a massive sheet of static water capable of absorbing the sun's rays and (b) by reducing the absorption rate of carbon dioxide by submerging so much of the region's plant life, but this was never likely to happen immediately. More to the point, the state media and the propagandists who control it are so used to criticism when it comes to the "World's Largest Hydropower Project", and so habituated to the predictions of disaster, that they find it necessary to get their retaliation in first. It seems that the efforts by dissident thinkers and environmentalists to link the Three Gorges Dam with the idea of catastrophe have proven effective, even in the highest levels of government.
