China dams the Yangtze

THREE GORGES DAM, China — With a $25 billion budget, 25,000 workers and 13 years of breakneck construction that displaced more than a million villagers, China has completed a giant and controversial dam across the mighty Yangtze River, seeking to tame the flood-prone waterway that has nurtured and tormented the Chinese people for 5,000 years.

Engineers, many of whom have spent their entire careers on the site, laid plans for the ceremonial pouring of a final slab of concrete Saturday to mark the moment: The dun-colored barrier at last has reached its full height of 606 feet and stretched a full 7,575 feet across the Yangtze's murky green waters in the Three Gorges area of central China's Hubei province 600 miles southwest of Beijing.

The Three Gorges Project, China's most ambitious engineering undertaking since the Great Wall, has replaced Brazil's Taipu Dam as the world's largest hydroelectric and flood-control installation, Chinese officials said, with the strength to hold back more water than Lake Superior and power 26 generators to churn out 85 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity a year when the final touches are completed in 2009. Hoover Dam, by comparison, generates more than 4 billion kilowatt-hours a year.

"This is the grandest project the Chinese people have undertaken in thousands of years," said Li Yong'An, general manager of the government's Three Gorges Co., which runs the project under the direct leadership of Premier Wen Jiabao.

Forging ahead

In its scope and ambition — as well as its determination to push forward despite the human costs — the Three Gorges Project has become a symbol of China's relentless energy and determination to take its place among the world's great economic powers. At the same time, it has demonstrated the Communist Party's willingness to sacrifice individual rights for the country's general welfare and take high-stake risks in the name of progress.

11111


Some key facts about the Three Gorges project, which will be the world's biggest flood-control and hydropower station when completed in 2009:

The project is located near what was the town of Sandouping in the central province of Hubei on the Yangtze, China's longest and mightiest river.

The dam's reservoir is 607 feet in height and 7,575 feet in length and can store up to 1377 billion cubic feet of water.

At full capacity, the dam will be capable of generating 85 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity a year from 26 power turbines.

The dam and attached locks have required 950 million cubic feet of concrete.

The reservoir created by the dam has inundated nearly 370 miles of land, including two cities, 11 counties and 116 towns in Hubei and neighboring Chongqing municipality. More than 1 million people have been relocated, 1,599 factories submerged.

The dam's final price tag, estimated at $10.8 billion in 1993, is expected to reach $25 billion.

One of its main functions is to tame the Yangtze's floods, which have drowned countless thousands over the centuries.

Environmentalists fear the project will cause severe pollution and silting by slowing the river's flow with waste from the remnants of abandoned factory sites, homes and hospitals.

Sources: Reuters; Three Gorges Project Corporation (www.ctgpc.com)

China has long dreamed of a dam across the Yangtze to ease flooding and facilitate navigation. Sun Yat-Sen, revered as the founder of the Chinese republic, urged construction as early as 1918. U.S. engineers suggested a dam right after World War II. Mao Zedong, whose Communist Party took over in 1949, wrote seven years later that "walls of stone" should rise from the river.

It was left to the present-day Communist leadership, dominated by engineers and driven to build, to put the project into motion. Li Peng, a former waterworks official, got the project off the ground in the late 1980s when he was premier. The first earth was turned in 1993 under the president at the time, Jiang Zemin, a Soviet-educated engineer. The dam's completion is now being celebrated under President Hu Jintao, who was trained as a hydraulic engineer and has adopted "scientific development" as a mantra.

Nagging questions

But critics of the project — they are many, in China and abroad — have questioned whether building a giant dam is really scientific in the 21st century, when the United States and other nations are weighing the wisdom of damming their rivers. Despite the $25 billion price tag, they note, the Three Gorges Dam will produce only 2 percent of China's electricity by 2010. Moreover, environmentalists have warned that the backup of water behind the dam could end up as a giant waste-collection pool for Chongqing, China's largest urban conglomeration about 250 miles upstream.

"There are two sides to everything, and the Three Gorges Project is no exception," said Cao Guangjing, the building company's deputy manager. "But many studies, undertaken since the beginning, have shown that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages."

The government has set aside $5 billion to build sewage-treatment plants around Chongqing and other upstream cities to prevent the river from turning into a cesspool, officials pointed out. Tests so far show the water quality has not suffered, even though water has been backing up for several years, they said.

Li Yong'An, the dam-building company's manager, said despite its difficulties, the project solves "one of the Chinese people's most important afflictions," the flooding that has ravaged the Yangtze basin for centuries. Floods killed more than 145,000 in 1931, according to Chinese records, and another 142,000 four years later. As late as 1998, with the dam under construction, 1,300 were reported killed by river waters that spilled the banks.

Now, said deputy director Cao, engineers will be able to control the flow of water during the peak flooding months of summer, letting it back up in a huge basin that will reach up to 385 miles upstream.

But to make way for the impounded water, which now has risen to more than 400 feet above its natural level, at least 1,200 villages and two towns had to be moved. Displaced residents already total about 1.1 million people, according to a government count. Wen, who heads the government's Committee for Construction of the Three Gorges Project, last week authorized a further rise to 470 feet next fall, which will displace another 80,000.

The Zigui County seat, a community of 60,000 people, baked under a warm sun Wednesday several thousand feet away from its former location — now underwater. The village of Zhongbao, whose inhabitants once prospered growing oranges by the riverside, also was submerged, reduced to a reflection on the river's surface just under the dam. One city farther upstream, Fengjie, was rebuilt about 10 miles inland from its traditional riverside location, only to be moved again when engineers discovered the new site was unstable.

"The displaced-people problem is a big one," Li acknowledged, "and ultimately our ability to deal with it will determine whether the Three Gorges Project is successful or not."

Graft

Li said Wen's government has guaranteed that all those displaced will be compensated and provided with a new house and a new livelihood. But many displaced have complained from the beginning that their compensation was siphoned off by corrupt local officials and that they cannot make a living in their new locations.

The State Audit Office reported as early as 1999 that millions of dollars were being embezzled. Scores of officials were investigated and many prosecuted, according to the official New China News Agency. But the complaints have not stopped.

Chen Qun, a disgruntled Zhongbao villager, said Wednesday that his community's 2,000 residents were promised $450 each when they had to pack and leave in 1993. So far, he said, they have received only a third of that amount and corrupt local officials have pocketed the rest.

When they heard foreign reporters were about to visit the dam, Chen said, several villagers put up banners urging Beijing to "Punish the corrupt officials" and "Give us back our space for survival." But police jailed the activists for several hours Monday and tore down the banners, he said.