History Engulfed As China's Hunger For Power Casts Thousands Adrift
The Age
Saturday May 31, 2003
Tomorrow, engineers begin blocking the Yangtze River, submerging an area rich in history and natural beauty. Hamish McDonald reports.
Centuries-old towns have been turned into slopes of rubble, awaiting the waters.
The woman was about 50, peddling snacks to the people waiting in trucks and buses on the gravel ramp leading to a ferry landing at Yunyang. Between sales, she embroidered an auspicious magpie-and-plum-blossom design on a pair of shoe insoles for her husband.
We pointed across the 500 metres of swirling yellow water that is the Yangtze River to a slope on the other bank, where hard-hatted workmen could be seen on stone terraces and staircases. Until a few months ago, these had been the foundations of the 1700-year-old Zhang Fei Temple, built in memory of a famous third-century general.
Tomorrow afternoon, 290 kilometres downstream near a town called Zigui, engineers will lower massive sluice-gates in a new dam across the river. Such is the flow of the Yangtze, which drains a swathe of China's mountainous inland back to the Tibetan plateau, that the river will rise 70 metres above its current level by the middle of June, backing 600 kilometres through the majestic Three Gorges and beyond the vast metropolis of Chongqing. When the last section of dam is finished in six years, the water will rise a further 40 metres.
Six months ago, the Zhang Fei Temple was carefully dismantled. It is now being reassembled upstream and will reopen for visitors in July.
``Did she miss the temple?" we asked the woman embroidering the shoe liners. She turned to face the empty site and affected shocked surprise. We persisted. ``Were the temple gods regarded by Yunyang people as being very generous in granting wishes?"
She smiled. ``It depends on whether you believe it or not," she said, as she bent back to her stitching.
Local people are extremely wary of what they say about the mega-project, which has uprooted more than one million of them from their homes and dramatically scarred a landscape regarded as one of the world's natural wonders.
Nothing has been allowed to stop or diminish the glory of the Three Gorges Dam. According to official propaganda, tomorrow's closing of the sluicegates will be a moment for China's people to yangmeituqi - to fill with pride.
In 1992, Communist Party chairman Li Peng, a Stalinist-inclined hydro-electric engineer, gave the go-ahead for the biggest civil engineering project in history, officially costing about $A37 billion but as much as $A114 billion by some estimates.
Zhu Rongji, who succeeded Li Peng in 1998, had his doubts about the project, warning darkly of corruption and technical short cuts that led to concrete with the strength of ``mashed tofu". But by then it was too late to stop or scale down the dam, which had become a symbol of the Communist Party's power.
The dam's vast wall is 185 metres high and two kilometres wide. Officials say the project will be a ``world-famous engineering marvel" that tourists will flock to see. Visitors not of a technical bent may marvel more at the philistinism of the regime that created it.
Ancient towns have been turned into rubble to make way for it. In Wanxian, an ancient stone staircase used by countless travellers will disappear, like most of the inscriptions carved in the gorges by boatmen and the ``trackers" who hauled their junks and sampans by rope up through the rapids.
More than 1000 archaeologists were conscripted in a belated effort to preserve as much as possible. Important buildings like the Zhang Fei Temple are being relocated, some concentrated in new ``cultural zones" that will, in effect, be theme parks. Some of the rock carvings will be chiselled out and put in museums. A mid-river rock known as the White-Crane Sill near Chongqing, decorated with carved fish, will be placed in an underwater glass case, which tourists will be able to reach by tunnel.
The town of Fengdu, which has long been regarded as one of the best places in China to be buried, from the point of view of a happy afterlife, was torn down last October. Thousands of hilltop tombs dating back to the third-century Han Dynasty were bulldozed to make way for apartment blocks.
``We can only save one-tenth of historic sites and relics," Xu Guangji, a senior archaeologist of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told the state-run China Daily newspaper recently. ``The rest will be forced to go under water."
In place of this rich slice of Chinese history, tourists will see modern towns of medium-rise, white-tiled buildings linked by elevated roadways and high-level bridges. Cable cars will replace the stocky porters who now carry cargo up from the river strung on poles across their shoulders.
The engineering case for the Three Gorges Dam is not proved yet. At about $A2136 per installed kilowatt (three times that, if the highest unofficial costing is used), its power is vastly more expensive than the energy produced by smaller, dispersed generators based on efficient gas turbines.
The water drawn from the dam for the new canals to drought-prone northern China may not be the cleanest either, with waste treatment plants for the river towns being something of an afterthought.
One of China's most eminent hydrologists, Huang Wanli, insisted to his death in 2001 that the Yangtze's huge silt load and shifting gravel floor will quickly fill the dam, making it useless and even more of a flood danger than the natural river. Project managers claim tree planting and land conservation in the headwaters will prevent this.
The dam will also displace fish and wildlife. The threatened Chinese sturgeon migrates from the sea to the Yangtze headwaters to spawn, but the dam now blocks its path. Chongqing environmentalist Wu Dengming and his Green Volunteers League are struggling to save Francois' Leaf-monkeys, an endangered species whose plaintive cry figures in poems written about the gorges more than 1000 years ago.
Whether future bards find inspiration in the Three Gorges remains to be seen, but there seems little poetry in the souls of the people building this concrete monument to their own prosaic vision.
A LONG TIME COMING
• The Three Gorges dam was first proposed by Chinese republican leader Sun Yat-sen in 1919.
• China's communists embraced the idea when they came to power in 1949 but it was not until the early 1990s that a combination of political ruthlessness and financial power let them go ahead.
• By then, big dams had gone out of fashion in the West, but in China, as Australian National University historian Gavan McCormack notes, the ``mechanistic" view of nature had become deeply rooted.
© 2003 The Age
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