We decided to travel the next short section upriver by plane – if only to experience the underside of Chinese civil aviation. It so happens that the connection between Wuhan and the much smaller old treaty port of Yichang – a flight of forty minutes, compared with ten hours in a bus or another day and a night in a steamer – is not between what we would conventionally describe as airports. This trip would make use of the second tier of Chinese aviation, in which the departures and arrivals are at what might be better classified only as aerodromes.
Horror stories of China's conventional air services are legion. I was on a flight once between Qingdao (the city where Tsingtao beer is made) and Shanghai. We were grossly overbooked, as was often the case in those days, and so the staff lugged a number of armchairs from the waiting lounge and set them down in the plane's aisle. The stewardesses, who saw no untoward safety implications in this arrangement, were irritated because they had to clamber over the lumpily stuffed chairs during the flight. But this barely affected the in-flight service: the only item the women were handing out – there was no food or drink – were small empty tins, the kind of thing in which to keep cough drops. There was no discernible reason for the gift: perhaps there had been a surplus in some distant factory.
Then again, about a year later, I was flying to some other Yangtze valley city from Harbin, in Manchuria. I was sitting next to a young man who had never flown before, and he was frightened to death. Despite my being both a stranger and a furry barbarian, he took my hand and squeezed it white as we began the take-off roll. The aircraft accelerated to full speed, after which there was a bang, an engine erupted in smoke and we lurched off onto the grass. We rested there for half an hour while technicians swarmed over the wing, and my new friend sobbed bitterly. Then we started again, trundled back onto the runway, and the pilot said in a nervous voice: ‘OK – we try once more.’ The youngster buried his head in his hands as we took off, this time flawlessly.
On this occasion it took us a good hour even to find the airfield. The normal Wuhan airport is a big affair, with radars, a departure hall, customs officers and touts offering taxis. But the field reserved for flights going to Yichang and similarly obscure places is not much more than a meadow, and is more or less in the middle of town. We had to find our way down a maze of back alleys, past broken-down factories and breeze-block tenements, through middens and swamps alive with black pigs. Ten minutes or so of this and then the buildings fell away and there was open land ahead, with soldiers, a couple of canvas-and-dope biplanes painted in camouflage drab and, parked outside a rusting tin shack, an ancient Russian prop-driven aircraft sporting strange wings that drooped down almost to the ground.
Half a dozen soldiers were playing football with a beer bottle, and the plane's pilot was arguing with a taxi driver. Was this the plane for Yichang? we asked. He grunted and turned away, a response that Lily interpreted as a sign of assent and welcome. No one checked our tickets, and no one minded where, or indeed if, we sat. Eventually the pilot and a rather pretty girl in a sort of half uniform climbed aboard, looked at us and said, Yichang? A couple of elderly men and a schoolboy climbed into the plane along with us; we rolled into position, bumped over a few potholes, and took off.
We flew very low, over a land filled with canals and dykes and lock gates. This was flood country – or, more properly, this was country where, year after year, floods downstream were meant to be taken care of. According to the maps, this was indeed the celebrated Jinjiang Flood Diversion Region, the main bastion of protection against downstream floods. According to ancient design, each time the river crested, so the locks would be opened, the diversion canals below us would be filled, the pressure on the main Yangtze dykes would be eased. Generally speaking the Jinjiang system had worked well since it was improved in the aftermath of the 1931 floods. Very occasionally these arrangements have proved less than adequate, and a few dikes were breached; then there were inundations, wreckage and death. But not this year, or at least not at this place.
From ten thousand feet – our rattling old plane was not pressurized, and so we flew low – all looked quite benign. This was one of the season's infrequent rain-free days, so the visibility was good. Beneath us was far less a scene of disaster and mayhem than the newspapers and television reports of the previous weeks would have us believe. In one large diversion canal, perhaps three hundred yards wide, there was just a trickle of water coursing down the centre channel; and when we flew over the cement spillways of its diversion dam, they were quite dry, the iron gates between them and the Yangtze firmly shut.
On the strength of the evidence below it was still difficult to imagine that the floods in the Yangtze valley this year were peculiarly bad. Farther south, in the rivers near Changsha, they could well be worse – I had no way of knowing. But here I still suspected that a useful fiction was being created, and whipped to a froth by the ever cunning government. All the time we'd been in Wuhan the drumbeat had been going on, night after night on television and in morning paper after morning paper: floods, floods, floods. And in truth there were some signs that this was a fairly bad year: the waters off the Bund wharves had been rushing by at frightening speed, and a blue truck that some careless driver had left on a pier was, on the day we left, up to its roof in water.
But at the same time no dyke had been breached, no levee overcome, no city street flooded. The river may have been in a fairly robust mood, but what was being put about by the government-run press was, I felt sure, considerably more dramatic than reality. And, uncharitable though it might be, I couldn't shake the feeling that it was very largely propaganda, and if so, all in the cause of winning justification from a highly sceptical world – and a fairly sceptical China – for the building of the Three Gorges Dam.
China, which came spectacularly early to so many technologies – printing, gunpowder, iron casting, the anchor, the compass, the rudder, the wheelbarrow – came surprisingly late to the idea of building dams. The Egyptians had blocked part of the Nile with a masonry dam near Memphis as long ago as 2900 B C: and there are Arabian dams dating from the seventh century before Christ. But the Chinese left dam building until nearly three thousand years after the Egyptians – the first, a modest structure on a Yangtze tributary, did not go up until around 200 B C. One might have thought that the Chinese would have arranged matters otherwise, since the single most important purpose of a dam – the elimination of floods – has long been more necessary in flood-ridden China than it ever has in most other countries.
But there was good reason for the Celestials' apparent tardiness. Hydraulics had long been a Chinese fascination: the country's rivers were so great and so wayward, and the livelihood of so many millions depended on their proper management, that it could hardly be otherwise. But exactly how to manage them? About 2500 years ago a pair of distinct and entrenched schools of thought arose, reflecting the different views of the ruling theocracies: one was advanced by the Taoists, the other by the Confucianists. It may seem odd to westerners that religion had any impact at all on hydraulics: but it is a measure of the peculiar importance of the country's waterways – as well as a reminder of the delicious strangeness of China – that its priests and philosophers did take so seriously the question of exerting control over them.
The views were diametrically opposed. Taoists, followers of what we might call a bohemian way of life, supported the building of only very low levees beside rivers and, generally speaking, letting them devise their own courses to the sea. Confucianists, who took a more rigid approach to governance and life in general, were also much more rigid in their approach to rivers: they believed that massive dykes should be built to corral the waterways along man-made courses and that the extra land thus freed should be intensively used for agriculture. They had a fatalistic attitude to the disadvantages of their ideas: they accepted that their approach might well contribute to infrequent but massive flooding disasters – that their dykes would probably prevent moderate floods, but would likely break during serious flooding, causing occasional catastrophes. This, Confucian hydraulicists agreed, was an acceptable trade-off for the intervening periods of fertility and prosperity.
The technologies of the modern world, and the end of dynastic China, brought to a sudden end such dreamy philosophical disputations. The republican governments that ran the country in the years following the 1911 Revolution were undistinguished and inexperienced, and their policies often collapsed in a shambles – but they had grandiose ideas for practical reform. They built courts and prisons, a nationwide school system and a network of new railways; they constructed a central mint, planted forests, organized sweeping reforms in animal husbandry and promoted new breeds of cattle.
Most ambitiously of all, Sun Yat-sen wrote a paper in 1919 entitled ‘A Plan to Develop Industry’; and there, in a long section on ‘Improvements of Navigable Rivers and Canals’, he set out his ideas for a massive scheme for improving the country's flood control and irrigation system, and for generating electricity, by building scores of big dams.
The one structure that all – and most especially Dr Sun – felt should be the lynchpin of this network, and a symbol of the way in which modern Man could tame and harness ancient and unruly Nature, was to be the mother of all dams – a dam that should, could and would be built across the Yangtze. Sun championed this cause for the remaining six years of his life: one of his last speeches, on the subject ‘The People's Livelihood’, announced his belief that such a mighty dam could create thirty million horsepower, which would produce untold and unimaginable wealth for the peoples of central China.
A spot somewhere along the 140-mile defile known as the Three Gorges would, he declared, be the obvious site for a dam across the Yangtze. It looked just perfect: the kind of place where, if the river was scaled down enough, any playful child would want to raise a toy barrage of mud and sticks. Very big beavers would be in hydraulic heaven at a place like this.
Upstream of the Gorges the river meanders across the former inland sea that is now known as China's Red Basin (called by geologists the Sichuan Basin). This fertile plain, warm, well watered and sheltered and layered with thick brick-red soils, is home to 100 million people. It would be a hugely populous and wealthy country if it were a self-standing nation – which in many ways it seems to be. It is hemmed in on all sides by high mountains, the Chinese spoken there has an unusual and guttural tone and its cuisine, based around a pepper that tastes uncannily like Tabasco mixed with detergent, has a memorable singularity.
The Yangtze gathers and quietens here in the Red Basin, pausing for breath after its headlong dash down from the Tibetan Plateau. It gains its riverine maturity here, it collects huge new tributaries (the four biggest of them giving Sichuan its name, which means ‘Four Rivers’), as well as a vast new volume of water and a barely imaginable quantity of sediment. At Chongqing the river – here still known as Chang Jiang, the Long River – is 610 feet above the level of the sea at the Woosung Bar. It is also 476 feet above the level of Yichang, the city to which our rattling aircraft was heading.
Between Chongqing and Yichang is a range of mountains – jagged three-thousand-footers all, outliers of the limestones and sandstones of the Tibetan hills that have here uncoiled their tentacles toward the eastern flats. A passerby will notice that once in a while the unfolded hills reveal a granite or a gneiss or a schist; mostly, though, the ridges are of ancient limestones, with softer shales and marls, or harder sills of volcanic rock, sandwiched between. The Yangtze escapes to the coast through them – she descends the 476 feet in just 140 miles of always fast, often turbulent and frequently raging river.* In places the defile through which she runs is squeezed to a width of no more than 350 feet – and the great volume of water, which might have occupied half a mile of width before, and which will spread languidly across a mile or more below, surges through it, slicing away the sides (and causing formidable landslips) and scouring away the riverbed, so that the Yangtze here is one of the deepest rivers in the world.
To a builder of concrete dams, a river squeezing its way through a narrow valley presents a heaven-sent opportunity for spectacular results at relatively low cost. The engineer needs merely to find a good and geologically stable place between the cliffs at the lower end of the rift, and then build his wall of concrete there: the waters will rise and fill the valley behind, and they will spread only minimally to the sides. Few people live on such steep valley sides and only where flooding affects tributary valleys will many lives be disrupted.
All the great structures that were built around the world during the dam builders' salad days – the Hoover and the Grand Coulee in western America, the Vaiont in Italy, the Grand Dixence in Switzerland, the Daniel Johnson in Quebec – were constructed in situations like this. A steep-sided valley and a fast-flowing stream were there first; the dam went up, and a few years later, in the place of valley and stream there was a consequently deep lake and a consequently tamed river – and fewer downstream floods. As an additional incentive, which the builders could weigh against the likely vast capital cost of the project, there would be electrical power aplenty to sell, from all the potential energy stored in the dam-impounded lake.
Dam builders, fired by an almost religious enthusiasm for their work and its long-term profitability, have been on a construction spree since the 1930s. This was when men like John L. Savage and his US Bureau of Reclamation colleagues were persuaded that mighty barrages across great rivers could have incalculable benefits – both in power generation and in flood prevention – for countries with expanding industrial economies. So they and their disciples around the world have put up thousands of dams – of which more than a hundred are the so-called super dams, truly immense constructions of concrete or earth whose walls soar more than 500 feet.
Almost all of the world's big rivers have been stopped up by monsters like these – the Ganges, the Zambezi, the Parana, the Nile, the Indus, the Danube, the Niger, the great Amazonian tributary known as the Tocantins. Only the Zaire (formerly the Congo), the Amazon proper – and the Yangtze – remain unblocked by a true giant dam. And from the thirties on an endless slew of good reasons have been put forward for adding the Yangtze to the list.
But if flood control had been principally behind Sun Yat-sen's original idea, his successors turned their thoughts more keenly to what was initially the almost incidental matter of generated electricity. The Three Gorges, it turned out, is ideally placed as a nexus of power generation. Most of China's factories – electricity-hungry factories, that is – have been built in the east of the country. Most of her mountains – ravine-rich, river-filled mountains, that is – lie at the other end of the nation, in the west. The Three Gorges site is almost in the dead centre of the country; it is, in fact, the closest river-filled ravine to the Chinese east – meaning that, in terms of economy, it has to be the most efficient site for delivering power to the centres of Chinese industry. The power transmission lines – not a trivial factor in the calculation of generating economics – could be much shorter with a Three Gorges site than with one in, say, far western Yunnan.
Developing a hydropower system has perceived environmental benefits, too; not least, it could lessen China's reliance on fossil fuels. The smoke and other emissions from China's vast coal reserves have to be seen to be believed: it sometimes seems a pall of yellow-brown smog hangs over all of the flat country outside the Gorges – a combination of coal-fired power stations and roadside brick kilns, all belching fumes into the air, full blast. A hydropower station somewhere in the Three Gorges, generating thousands of megawatts, would be bound to lessen the nation's reliance on dirty fuels: more and more, the planners who followed up Dr Sun's bold plan agreed that a Three Gorges dam was an ideal creation for the country's future.
But however ideal the Three Gorges project might seem to an enthusiast, it took engineers and politicians and military experts forty-nine years to choose the exact site for it. It took seventy-five years, moreover, from the day Dr Sun made his first visionary statement until the day the first sod was moved. Few construction projects anywhere in the world have taken quite so long to realize. Here was the time scale of a cathedral.
The matter of the right site was the most vexing. Most of those directly involved in the decades of discussions agreed on one thing: that any dam should be built a few miles upstream from Yichang, at the very end of the Xiling, the lowest of the Three Gorges. But then civil war, insurrection, terrorism, shortages of cash, anti-foreign sentiment, changes in ideology, power struggles and sudden caprices of the power elite all conspired to slow a more precise choice than this down to subglacial speed. The engineers and the scientists reported and recommended until they were blue in the face: but for half a century, nothing was done.
J. S. Lee – a British-educated Chinese geologist who went on, under the name of Li Siguang, to work for the People's Republic and to become dignified by the title of the Father of Modern Chinese Geology – performed the original surveys in the 1930s and suggested that the best site could be at a turn in the river near the village of Sandouping. George Barbour, the American who worked with Lee, thought much the same.
Then in the 1940s along came John Savage, the American dam builder from Denver who professed himself to have ‘fallen in love with the Yangtze's water resources' – not with the Yangtze, but with its water resources – ‘at first sight’. Savage was with the Reclamation Bureau; he was a legendary figure in American dam building and his involvement in those early discussions was a harbinger of the intimate involvement of Americans in the scheme.
He suggested six sites, the highest just a few hundred yards down from the lower end of the Xiling Gorge, the lowest at a point some nine miles above Yichang. The bureau drew detailed designs for a long concrete barrage with a series of ship locks that would allow navigation beyond the dam – a critical aspect of a project that, of course, was designed specifically to block what was a very busy shipping route. In 1947 a team of fifty Americans worked for a while at one of the sites, only too aware that the Nationalist government that had hired them was, in all likelihood, not long for this world: Mao's Communists were gathering strength day by day. The cancellation of the project later in that same year came as no surprise to the outsiders: the torch would have to be passed to a new government, all suspected – and it was by no means sure that Mao, once he had gained power, would be as committed to the Three Gorges dam as his fervent ideological opponents had been.
It was a little later that John Hersey, the China-born journalist and writer who produced what remains the most lyrical of all books about the Yangtze, A Single Pebble, offered his vision of the project to the outside world. The hero of his novella is a young American engineer who is taken on one of the great trading junks, a ma-yang zi, to survey the Three Gorges and ‘to see whether it would make sense for my company to sell the Chinese government a vast power project in the river's famous Gorges’.
The story's theme is the life of the trackers, the stoic and tenacious men who, with bare feet, broad shoulders and bamboo hawsers, pull his junk up through the Gorges' rapids. But more than once the narrator imagines his beloved dam, with the kind of wild rhetorical flourishings of which Mao Zedong would have eagerly approved:
The second evening in Witches' Mountain Gorge, just after we had spar-moored for the night against a big boulder in a quiet cove, and while most of the trackers rested on their haunches on the rocks ashore, sipping tea, I sat alone on the conning deck watching blossoms of sunset unfold on the edges of the small delicate misty shrub-like clouds that stood naturalized in the visible sky over the gorge upstream – when all at once I imagined a dam.
There it was! Between those two sheer cliffs that tightened the gorge a half-mile upstream, there leaped up in my imagination a beautiful concrete straight-gravity dam which raised the upstream water five hundred feet; much of its curving span was capped by an overflow spillway controlled by drum gates and tube valve outlets; and a huge hydraulic jump apron designed to pass unprecedented volumes of water stood ready to protect both the dam and the lower countryside against the freshets of springtime. Ingenious lift-locks at either side carried junks up and down on truly hydraulic elevators. The power plant was entirely embedded in the cliffs on both sides of the river. The strength of the Great River, rushing through the diversion tunnels that had been used for the construction of the dam, and through other great tubes and shafts bored through solid rock, and finally into the whirling gills of nearly a hundred power units, created a vast hum of ten million kilowatts of light and warmth and progress.
The Communists loved the idea as keenly as did John Hersey's narrator, and as keenly as had their Nationalist predecessors. Once they had their house in some kind of order they set up committees to consider the various sites. Drilling rigs went up, core samples were taken – and in 1959 the committee said it would choose one of three sites, all near Sandouping. A year later the uppermost of those three, a narrowing of the river close to a low island called Zhongbao, was finally chosen.
Except it turned out not to be final at all. The military promptly weighed in, and a committee of generals decided that at Sandouping the river was still far too wide to allow for adequate air defence. Since a gigantic dam like this would be a prime site for terrorist or foreign attack, good defence was of prime concern. So the Chinese government went back to look for more sites – and then, in another corner, the Cultural Revolution began. The plans for the dam were, on the one hand, disrupted; and on the other hand, they became embroiled in politics – the dam was seen by Mao and his allies as perfect propaganda for the promotion of his authority and power.
Mao's poem ‘Swimming' envisaged the structure in two lines of verse, lines that helped invest the project with an almost mythic importance. Building a dam across the Yangtze was in many ways like swimming across the Yangtze – it was a means of demonstrating man's supremacy, and Mao's supremacy, and the Party's supremacy, over the Chinese landscape, as well as being the realization of the worthiest of ambitions. Come the late 1950s, every cadre in the land had started to see in Three Gorges Dam a perpetual memorial to the greatness of the Great Helmsman. If there were any doubts, any concerns about the harsh realities of the dam's construction, of its likely costs, its long-term impact, its risks, its practical disadvantages – all were swept away under the relentless imperium of dogma and fanatic belief.
In the midst of the political chaos of the time there came news of yet more potential sites, and site selection took on as frantic a tempo as that of the Great Leap Forward. The project began to lose contact with reality. Someone piped up to claim he liked a hitherto unmentioned place called Shipai; a committee thought that this was indeed a good place, and for a while all effort was devoted to looking at Shipai. But three years later another committee rejected it: unstable geology. Other new names joined the list: Huanglingmiao, Meirentuo, the Nanjin Pass. Two years later still came the recommendation that the dam be built at yet another place, this one called Taipingxi: on this site the builders would need less concrete, but there would have to be more costly excavation. Taipingxi the generals also liked: they could set up lots of anti-aircraft guns here, they reported. But the excavation costs scuppered this choice a year or so later.
Back and forth matters went, committee after committee doing and then undoing the work of one another. But finally, once Mao was dead and the Cultural Revolution safely buried and half-forgotten and the Gang of Four in prison, a more serious-minded set of committees – a set that was apolitical, to the extent that in Communist China any government body can be apolitical – made its once-and-for-all-decision. It came via a terse report from the Ministry of Water Conservancy to the State Council in November 1979: whatever the shortcomings of the site for air defence, the original place that had been suggested fifty years before, Sandouping, was where the Three Gorges Dam should and would in fact be built. Now there was merely the question of how big the dam should be, and whether all those who mattered in China and beyond would agree to build it.
The international community was at first excited. The Americans – firms and organizations like Bechtel, the US Army Corps of Engineers, Merrill Lynch, and Coopers and Lybrand, all of whom have expertise in huge capital projects – formed a technical liaison group. The Canadians gave money and said they would be involved. The World Bank began to research the scheme. Sweden and Japan talked openly of pumping in funds. A technical debate began, raging throughout the world's dam-building community.
The question of how high – how tall the dam, and how high the level of the reservoir behind it – has been bitterly debated for years. A high reservoir level – anything more than 500 feet – mean that more electricity could be generated and deep-draught ships could be accommodated upstream of the dam: but it also would mean that the dam wall itself would have to be taller, and that more people living beside the river would have to be moved as their towns, villages and houses flooded. There would also be little slack available to be taken up in the event of a flood. A lower reservoir level, on the other hand, would cost less – fewer people would need to be moved, and the dam could be lower; but with a proposed low level of around 450 feet, rapids would begin to appear in the upper part of the Gorges, big ships would have difficulty navigating there, and there would be less power potential for the electricity distributors to sell.
A decision was finally announced by Li Peng, the Chinese prime minister, in 1992: the ‘normal pool level’, as it is known, of the proposed Three Gorges Dam would be a stunning 573 feet.* The dam would be 610 feet high, and it would be 6864 feet from one side to the other – more than five times as wide as the huge Hoover Dam. The Aswan Dam in Egypt is twice as long and half as high – but it is a rock-fill dam, and not, like this, fashioned from concrete and iron. The huge wall proposed for the Yangtze would swallow up 26 million tons of concrete and 250,000 tons of steel and it would create a 600-square-mile lake stretching back from the dam for some 372 miles – backing water up in the Gorges and across nearly half of the Red Basin to a point considerably past the city of Chongqing.
The flooding of the valley that would result would be far worse than previously envisaged: it would mean that 1,250,000 people would have to be moved, whether they liked it or not. Thirteen cities like Wanxian (150,000 people) and Fuling (80,000) would be inundated; 140 normal-sized towns would go under, another 1352 villages would be either wholly or partly submerged. Some 8000 recognized archaeological sites would disappear, and scores of temples and pagodas would vanish beneath the waters. The Gorges themselves would cease to be places of rapids and whirlpools, becoming instead a mere section of a deep and placid lake, with only the barest downstream movement of its waters; and even the steep embankments of Chongqing, so much a part of the city's character for so many thousands of years, would be flooded to the point where Yangtze water would be lapping against the city's lower slum streets.
But at the same time – and this is why shipping firms rallied instantly behind Li's announcement – ten-thousand-ton cargo vessels and passenger liners would be able to journey the entire way from the ocean to Chongqing. Nearly 80 per cent of China's waterborne trade goes along the Yangtze: the dam and its effects on navigation would increase the tonnage of Yangtze river cargoes fivefold and reduce costs by 35 per cent. Chongqing, 1300 miles from the sea and currently limited by the rapids of the Three Gorges to receiving low-water summertime ships of no more than 1500 tons, would become a major Chinese port, able to take truly big ocean-going ships all year round. A hinterland that is truly the heartland of the nation would have its products shipped to world markets with a speed and economy it had never known before.
The power generation establishment rallied behind the government too, and with similar enthusiasm. The plans called for generators to crank out more than 18 gigawatts – 18,200 megawatts – of electrical power. This is four times more than any power station in Europe; compared with other dams, it is eight times the power capacity of the Nile's Aswan Dam, and half as much again as the world's current largest river dam, the Itaipu Dam in Paraguay. Truly the Three Gorges Dam was an almighty project: in the propaganda I had received in the mail before I left, a writer writhed in ecstasy as he posed to his readers a rhetorical question:
‘This is an opportunity that knocks but once… an opportunity to display our talent to the fullest… If a foreign friend asks: What will you, the Chinese all over the world, leave for this era? we must reply firmly: The Yangtze River Three Gorges Project! We'll present this epic undertaking which will benefit the nation and the people not only for the present but for centuries to come.’
Li Peng needed a project of this magnitude and stature to revivify his image and his fellow leaders' morale, still shaken by the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square tragedies. He joined the chorus of hyperbole: ‘The Three Gorges Dam,’ he declared in 1992, ‘will show the rest of the world that the Chinese people have high aspirations and the capabilities to successfully build the world's largest water conservancy and hydroelectric power project.’
Moreover, there was a portent. It did not pass unnoticed that the projected date for the highly symbolic closing of the Yangtze's flow – a central part of a dam-building project, when the waters are passed around the dam site in diversion tunnels – was due to take place in 1997. That was also the year when Hong Kong would revert from British rule back to China's, after 155 years in the barbarian wilderness. The idea that Li Peng's China – or Deng Xiaoping's China, for the former is little more than a puppet of the latter – could in the same year also fly in the face of the barbarian opposition, which was already mounting, and stop up her greatest river: the symbolism of such coincidence augured exceedingly well, in the minds of the masters of the moment.
For by now not everyone, particularly outside China, was quite so enthusiastic. The foreign firms and government organizations that had been so eager to support the Chinese from the start of the project began to have their doubts only a few years later, as the avarice of one decade began to transmute into the more considered caution of the next. In part the doubts arose because of the new zeitgeist: a general feeling had arisen that large dams were ill-conceived projects, that few of them had realized the expectations offered for them, that all were too costly, most had caused grave environmental impacts on their surroundings, and that each was little more than pomposity writ in concrete, with totalitarian regimes favouring them most notably, as a way of impressing the peasantry with the rulers' energy, acumen and skill. The head of the US Bureau of Reclamation made a speech in 1994: from the organization that had built the Grand Coulee and the Hoover and the Glen Canyon Dams came word that, so far as America was concerned, the days of big-dam building were well and truly over. ‘Large dams are tremendously expensive,’ said the hitherto uncontroversial American hydrologist Daniel Beard. ‘They always cost more than you thought and tie up huge sums of capital for many years… There is no more visible symbol in the world of what we are trying to move away from than the Three Gorges Dam.’
*
The Three Gorges Dam – which the big-dam building industry still very much wanted, to construct, of course, no matter what was being said by official America – soon began to fall into popular disfavour for more specific reasons. A number of key reports on the dam each appeared to have buried within its text at least one major misgiving about the wisdom of so vast an undertaking – misgivings that, when added each to the other, slowly began to assume critical mass.
The US Army Corps of Engineers, for example, concluded that the dam would not, as intended, necessarily prevent flooding downstream. For a start, its engineers noted, a very large proportion of the Yangtze's water comes from tributaries – like the Han Shui, which roars in at the tri-city junction of Wuhan – that join the Yangtze below the dam. Then again, said the Corps technicians, there were very real risks that the dam could be breached – landslides, earthquakes (not uncommon in the hills to the east of the Sichuan Basin) and even war or terrorism could all place the structure at risk – with unimaginably terrible consequences for the huge cities sited downstream. Yichang, for example – this day's destination – would be drowned in a matter of hours: hundreds of thousands of people could die.
The Canadian governments International Aid Agency wrote a multi-volume study of the dam in 1989, recommending that it go ahead. But even this study – which was the basis for Li Peng's announcement of the reservoir height, and which had given him the necessary fillip to inaugurate the project formally – cautioned that in the still waters of the reservoir, huge quantities of silt would accumulate behind the dam wall. These would in time clog the turbine entranceways – and, more significantly, they would produce a lack of sediment in the river downstream of the dam, causing the river to flow more quickly, to scour the banks and the riverbed more severely, and to change the character – and the predictability – of an already wayward and capricious waterway even more. The walls of the Jinjiang flood diversion dykes – over which Lily and I were flying, and in which I saw suspiciously little water – would be seriously scoured by the new fast-flowing, sediment-poor waters: they would have to be strengthened and maybe even rebuilt, or else those living beside them would be at dire risk of even more dangerous flooding than they know already. Was this the kind of risk worth taking?
Other reports warned that this same lack of sediment would have damaging effects far, far downstream. Shanghai, more than a thousand miles away at the Yangtze's end, is a city built on top of a plain of sediment that is pushing itself outward into the East China Sea by more than two inches every day. But the arriving silt – so long as it arrives – also strengthens the bed on which Shanghai is built, a bed which is currently being undermined by tunnels and subways and all manner of the kind of human intervention expected in a rapidly expanding metropolis. Because of this, the city is already in danger of subsiding, slowly and perilously: the more the digging and the less the tonnage of arriving sediment, the more vulnerable is this biggest of Chinese cities to inundation by the very sea on which she is built. And beyond this danger, the lessening in the overall flow of the river will allow the tidal effects of the sea to seep farther back in the estuary, changing fishing patterns and altering the salinity of the soils and the groundwater. The effects of the dam, in this one very specialist area of interest, are legion.
Other effects are just as startling. Much was uncovered by the courageous work of a young Beijing journalist named Dai Qing, an engineer-turned-environmental-writer who is also, as it happened, the adopted daughter of one of China's most distinguished army marshals and a woman not to be toyed with. Miss Dai, who knew her subject, was appalled at the risky business of building the Yangtze dam, and throughout the late eighties she carefully collected a series of academic papers by well-respected engineers and hydrologists, each of whom had competent, well-argued and sound reasons for opposing the dam.
She gathered these papers – with nicely turned Chinese titles like ‘The Limited Benefits of Flood Control’, ‘We Are Very Worried, We Are Very Concerned: An Interview with Zhou Peiyuan and Lin Huainto' and ‘High Dam: Sword of Damocles' – into a book that she decided to call Chang Jiang! Chang Jiang!. In a moment of unparalleled chutzpah she then persuaded a publisher, a woman in the south-western city of Guiyang, to offer the book for sale early in 1989. This was just a few months before the student uprising in Beijing that culminated in the Tiananmen Square tragedy in June: the book was published when the country was in a dangerous ferment, and news of its contributors' opposition to the dam spread wildly across the country. Within months, two things had happened: all of China's elite and intelligentsia knew of the risks that were involved in going ahead with the monster project, and Dai Qing was languishing in prison. She stayed there for ten months, the country's first ‘green' victim, though in truth a dissident, like so many scores of others.*
The cascade effect of Dai Qing's book was quite remarkable, especially since it was to become the central issue in the first attempt at a parliamentary rebellion to take place in the country since the Communist victory in 1949.
First of all, in the late summer, the State Council announced it was postponing the project – not because of the book, of course; it camouflaged its reasons behind a bland and fatuous technical excuse. At the same time, stimulated by the opposition and the project's postponement, more papers began to emerge from the technical theocracies; one of them admitted that sixty small dams and two huge dams, the Banqiao and the Shimantan in Henan province, had all collapsed in August 1975, with tens of thousands – perhaps even hundreds of thousands – drowned. China's ability to engineer dams to withstand the extremes of rain and river was thrown into question – not the purely theoretical question of whether a dam the size of the Three Gorges project could be constructed safely, but whether, since a dam one fortieth as big had burst during a bad rainstorm, the country had the practical skills to be building big dams at all.
But it was the democratic rebellion that then followed that may be Dai Qing's most memorable legacy. The ‘technical problems' cited as the reason for the 1989 postponement were announced mysteriously ‘solved' in 1992, following which Li Peng finally went ahead and made the long-awaited construction announcement. But first, the Chinese constitution being what it is, he was obliged to put the matter to, and secure the rubberstamp approval of, the National People's Congress. The Congress met in Beijing in April 1992, with the delegates being canvassed like rarely before: opposition to the dam, based on Dai Qing's book, on the news of her imprisonment, and on the cascade of new academic papers her troubles had unleashed, was voiced outside the hall. A motion was introduced to present a speech criticizing the project. The meeting's chairman, however – acting on orders from the regime – said there would be no discussion: the vote would be taken there and then, on whether to include the project formally in the final Ten Year Plan of the twentieth century.
Cries of protest were heard. ‘The Congress has violated its own laws,’ yelled one opponent, aghast that no discussion would be permitted. She pressed her ‘No' button for the electronic tally. So, it turned out, did scores of others. Of the 2613 delegates who had gathered on that cool Friday afternoon, 813 – almost one third either voted against it or abstained. It was, in Chinese terms, a stunning rebellion against Party authority. By the end of the day it had become apparent that although Li Peng had won, it was a Pyrrhic victory, one that the whole world regarded in fact as a sweeping vote of no confidence.
One by one the international community's money sources, appalled by what had happened and by the growing perceived financial risks of the project, dropped away. The World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, Britain's Overseas Development Agency, America's Import-Export Bank, even Canada's International Aid Agency, which had once been so keen – they all said no, they would no longer participate in funding the dam.
The US Bureau of Reclamation, which had earlier signed a technical services agreement with the dam managers, now found itself threatened with lawsuits by seven American environmental organizations, who claimed that by taking part in the dam construction the bureau violated the terms of the Endangered Species Act. The bureau changed its mind hastily. In a terse note to the Chinese it said its technical cooperation would be suspended, ‘effective this day’. Risk managers in the big private companies – the merchant banks, the insurance brokers, the construction firms – said in increasing numbers that they now saw the Three Gorges Dam as an insupportable project, one that was vastly expensive, by no means a prudent investment.
The Chinese then had no choice but to do what the Chinese in such circumstances are the best at doing: they began to organize the entire project by themselves. China, in the matter of the Yangtze dam, was by the beginning of 1994 essentially on her own. Or she seemed to be at first.
Li Peng is a Russian-trained electrical engineer. His determination to have the dam built, come what may, stems both from that fact – his interest in capital projects, the bigger the better – and from his hope that his regime will leave a memorial to Mao and Maoism (and to himself, of course) that will last a thousand years. ‘The pet project of the red emperor' is how Dai Qing has styled the dam, and both Li and Deng Xiaoping have made it clear they expect their engineers to erect a structure of enduring nobility. But almost all of the criticism of the dam is based on the assumption that it will not last for a fraction of the anticipated time, and that its effects will be by turn minimally beneficial and a wholesale environmental disaster – indeed, that it may turn out to be a catastrophe waiting to happen. The debate can be a highly technical one; but in essence the critics – Chinese and Western both – have homed in since the start of construction on a small number of what they regard as dangerous weaknesses in the project.
The sedimentation problem, the first of these perceived weaknesses, is what critics insist will eventually kill the dam, and it will do so by throttling it to death. Five hundred and thirty million tons of sand and pebbles wash down through the Gorges every year, and the chances are that a large proportion of this material will settle at the base of the dam's retaining wall. Most of this can probably be flushed out – dams have devices that regularly do this, and a most spectacular sight it is when it happens.
But the Yangtze, hydrologists say, throws down far more than mere sand and pebbles. Huge cobbles and boulders are rolled down in this peculiarly violent current, and these, it is believed, will settle unflushably at the base of the dam, binding the sand together and clogging an ever rising mass of detritus as securely as if it were setting cement. The only way of keeping the silt moving is to keep the reservoir level low and the waterflow through the dam's gateways as rapid as possible. The power lobby and the shipping lobby won't hear of this: they want a high water level and a low flow-through rate so that they have maximum power potential and maximum ship draught. Li Peng is sympathetic to their views, and believes the sedimentation problems, if they exist, are manageable.
The sediment, opponents argue, will cause other and quite different problems as far away as Chongqing – the city that the dam builders say will become a major inland port. The reservoir waters will be flowing very slowly where they lap against the hills of Chongqing, and because of this they will dump silt precisely where the river presently sweeps it away.* The harbour at Chongqing, initially made deeper by the flooding, will swiftly become shallow again because of the new situation. The big ships that are expected to use the port will be unable to, unless there is constant and expensive dredging. The dam will thus have contributed, as its critics say it will in many areas, to creating the very problems it seeks to alleviate. In this specific case, it will turn Chongqing, planned as a major centre of shipping trade, into a nonport of even less significance than it is today.
Then there is the matter of safety. Dams break – and although not much has been said about dam bursts in China itself, it is now known that at least the two mentioned have broken, with disastrous results, because of either substandard construction or poor design. The Banqiao, an earthen dam on a tributary of the Lower Yangtze in Henan province, was long regarded as ‘an iron dam – one that can never fail’. Torrential rainstorms associated with a typhoon in August 1975 forced the reservoir behind the dam to rise nearly seven feet overnight, and the unexpectedly heavy siltation at the base of the structure prevented the water from flowing away, even when the sluice gates were wide open. Early on the third evening of the storm – a ‘two-thousand-year storm’, the weather bureau said – the water finally overtopped the dam, and the vast structure promptly burst: the resulting lake stretched for thirty miles downstream, and whole villages were inundated in seconds. Various human rights organizations have suggested that almost a quarter of a million people died. The Chinese said nothing about the catastrophe: news seeped out only in 1994, nearly twenty years after the event.
Is the Three Gorges area geologically stable enough? And might not the 370-mile lake that would be formed upstream of the dam with thousands of millions of tons of water pressing down on the fault-splintered country-rock – change the geostatic balance of the area to such an extent that earthquakes might be generated? Might there not be landslips – might not the infamous Huangla Stone, 140 million cubic feet of limestone a few miles upstream of the dam, detach itself from the towering cliffs and crash down into the lake, causing waves 250 feet high, which would surge over the dam, wreck its concrete lip and prompt the structure to crack, leak, buckle and perhaps burst? Earthquakes and landslips damage and destroy dams every bit as often as do flood-induced failures. The Chinese, it is thought, have been dangerously complacent about the seismic risks of this particular project.
Then again, whether or not the Chinese are capable of building or siting big dams at all, there is the question of whether the Three Gorges Dam, so incredibly large a structure, might not become a target for foreign or domestic bombing or sabotage. Dams are inviting targets: Germany's Mohne and Eder Dams were bombed and breached by the British in the Second World War, causing massive flooding of the Ruhr valley. The Perucia Dam in Croatia was badly damaged by terrorist bombs in 1993. In the kind of bizarre twist that only the North Koreans could come up with, the Pyongyang government at one stage threatened to build a dam across their own Han River and then blow it up, so that the resulting surge would flood Seoul, the southern capital. The Damoclean vulnerability of dams can be made to work in all kinds of ways.*
The Chinese are said to be taking extraordinary measures to prevent the Three Gorges Dam from ever being attacked. They are only too well aware of the demonic effect that as much as 400,000 cubic yards of water cascading unstoppably downward each second would have on nearby riverside cities like Yichang and Shashi, and perhaps even on more distant population centres like Wuhan and Jiujiang. The Chinese Air Force report on the poor defensibility of the Sandouping site was written twenty years ago; today there are plans to deploy some two divisions of soldiers in the immediate area of the dam site, to place guns and missile batteries at every vantage point and to organize a security net around the structure such that the most determined terrorist could not penetrate it. And if the dam were to be destroyed? Not to worry, say the propaganda leaflets sent out by the Yangtze Valley Planning Office, documents of startling complacency, ‘the dam would be capable of standing up to fairly powerful conventional weapons… but if it was attacked by nuclear weapons and totally destroyed, appropriate engineering and managerial measures would limit the damage caused by flooding.’ It is difficult to draw much comfort from these bland and hardly specific assurances.
The human costs of the dam construction are enormous: the difficulties of moving 1,250,000 people who will have lived all their lives in riverside towns and villages of great antiquity – although also, it has to be said, of an almost universal great ugliness – are legion. Already there have been reports of unrest: in 1992, nearly 180 men and women from what was called the Democratic Youth Party in Kaixian country were reportedly taken away by police and charged with sabotage and counterrevolutionary activity, relating, it is said, to their opposition to the dam. They have not been heard of since.
President Jiangs visit to the city of Jiujiang, hundreds of miles downstream, to plead for room for 200,000 people forced to become refugees was mirrored more recently by suggestions that displaced people might be sent – not asked to go, but sent; this is Communist China – to the miserable uplands of Xinjiang province, a thousand miles to the northwest. Xinjiang and Qinghai, where the Yangtze rises, are gulag country (the Chinese word for the reform-through-labour prisoner, laogai, is oddly similar to the Russian acronym). The Chinese government is planning a major cotton industry in the area, and advertises its benefits by saying, among other things, that a willing and able labour force of people moved from the flooded Yangtze valley ‘will shortly be available’.
And then there are the flooded archaeological treasures; and then there is the soon-to-be-ruined environment; and there will be the destruction of the fishes and reptiles and riverine mammals whose normal lifestyle includes using the whole of the lower and middle Yangtze for their spawning and breeding – the near extinct baiji and the similarly almost gone Yangtze alligator, the finless porpoise, the Chinese sturgeon, and the Siberian cranes that nest on Poyang Lake. All are now under threat, and the Chinese, except for setting up a couple of underfunded ‘research establishments' to assuage the most vocally expressed fears from outside, appear to do little, and seem utterly careless of their fate.
A dam that will cost perhaps as much as $36 billion, generating electricity that will have cost $2000 for every kilowatt of capacity - how can the Chinese afford it? And how can an international community bring itself to support or take part in the construction of an outdated monster of such low efficiency, of such great potential danger, of so short a potential life, with such highly questionable economics, and so fraught with severely negative human and environmental implications? Only by getting to Yichang itself, and by seeing the site, could answers to such questions begin to emerge.
We landed forty minutes later at an airport of an insignificance quite equal to the one in Wuhan. It too had biplanes lined up, and here, in a bucolic addition to the scene, a herd of cattle were grazing on the apron.* But I was charmed, now that we had survived the flight: there were dandelions and cosmos flowers in the grass, and the aerodrome had a look of wartime Oxford-shire – except that there was a terminal of worn brick, and inside it a man was asleep at a counter festooned with unsaleable wall hangings of tired-out tigers and smugly obese buddhas. A sign advertised the delights of the Sanxia Bingwan, the Three Gorges Hotel, and so there we went – not so much to savour its delights as to look for the droves of foreign firms who, I rather cynically suspected, would in spite of all the stated opposition now be flocking to Yichang to try to beg for work on the dam.
The hotel, where we arrived late in the evening, was half-built or half-demolished, it was difficult to say which. It was huge, echoing, empty and awful. It had the advantage of being right on the riverbank, and my room looked out onto the passing ships, of which there were scores, all sounding their sirens as they passed. The hotel's one restaurant closed at eight, and there was no possibility of room service. There was a bar, but everything in its refrigerator turned out to be frozen solid, which made the child-waitress giggle. I was sorely in need of a drink, and found the idea of a solid one a little less than amusing.
There were also said to be no foreigners in the hotel, except for a young woman from South Africa who was travelling through China on her own. She had the kind of small problem that wanderers find uniquely and, in retrospect only, delightfully Chinese.
She had wanted to check out of the hotel after her night's stay, so that she might catch the night train to Xian. Her bill was three hundred yuan. She offered in payment a Visa traveller's cheque for $100, a type and denomination that the hotel's advertising claimed it would accept and that would in normal circumstances be exchanged for eight hundred yuan. The guest could pay her bill, and receive five hundred in change.
But the cashier claimed not to have any money in his till at all: he would readily take the cheque in full settlement of the bill – but the girl would not receive any change. This would render her quite unable to pay for her train ticket, or anything else for that matter, until the next morning when – and if – she found a bank that would take a traveller's cheque. By the time I came across her she was on the point of wearily agreeing to do this – to give the hotel, in effect, an extra five hundred yuan for nothing.
I weighed in, not minding my own business at all. I told her that she was being presented with a scam as old as the Chinese hills, and that providing she had a totally unsigned traveller's cheque – which she did – I would change it for her at the going rate. The hotel cashier, a rat-faced little man, looked on with fury as I did this. The South African woman walked off into the night offering undying gratitude. The rat man stared daggers at me, promising by his expression that the service in his hotel would now become for us, if such were possible, significantly worse.
The doorman was a friendlier type. He said that all foreigners who came to Yichang these days – and there were a lot – stayed in the Taohualing Bingwan, the Peach Blossom Hotel. What is more, he said, ‘there are many beautiful girls there. Girls who like foreigners very much.’ We flagged down a cycle-ricksha and were at the front drive of the Peach Blossom ten minutes later.
It was a hormonal assault course. Lily walked a dutiful fifty feet behind me for the purpose of the experiment, and as I marched through the gloom towards the brilliantly lit hotel entrance – flashing neon Welcomes and promises of Untold Charms Within – my sleeve was plucked and my shoulders were rubbed by ten, twelve young women, who dashed out from behind parked cars.
The patter was straight from a bad Berlitz course. You are so handsome. You working for the dam? Your room number, please. I be your good friend. I very reasonable. My massage is excellent. You have much fun. Stop, kind mister, come here and let us have fuck. Getting rid of these girls was like swatting flies – as one brushed insect broke away, so another zoomed around to get at me on the other side. By the time I reached the hotel building I felt as though I had already had the massage I had been promised. Lily joined me moments later, breathless and not at all amused. The girls, she said, had hissed and sworn at her.
The receptionist, a solid woman in her forties, proved more than amenable when we asked if any foreigners were staying. In the past few months there had been dozens of groups, she said. This week she had, let's see – Japanese, she offered, and Canadians. She turned the computer screen towards us, and let us read down the list of likely surnames. There was a Brown in room 1204, an Ingrams in 1218, a MacFarlane in 806. All good Scots-Canadian names, it seemed. I called Mr Brown on the house phone, hoping that he had not succumbed to an Untold Charm Without. But he answered, and I asked him if he had by any chance anything to do with the Three Gorges Dam.
‘Too right,’ he said. ‘I'm exhausted. But the boss is in the bar. Deep negotiations, you know. Better approach him carefully.’
The bar was dark and ice cold. A karaoke machine was showing pictures but, mercifully, it had been turned down so that it was almost inaudible. In the darkest corner sat a group of three foreigners and four Chinese, huddled around a table. The foreigners were nursing beers; the Chinese had peanuts. This was what I had expected to find: for these were the Canadians, chasing work.
The bartender said there had been groups of similarly eager and anxious lao wai coming to his bar almost every day this year. They had been meeting the same Chinese, all of whom came from the Three Gorges Project Corporation, which he knew was housed in a modern office building near by. ‘They want to be part of our dam,’ he said. Last month, the bartender said, he had taken his wife and children to see a dam exhibition on the ground floor of the corporation's office. ‘It is very great, what we are doing. We have good reason to be proud. My children thought it was wonderful. So powerful. So grand.’
The Canadians did not take quite so lyrical an approach. Nor, it seemed, had they taken much heed of the world's criticism of the project. They were there quite simply because they wanted a piece of the action.
They turned out to be fairly small players – an Ontario-based firm that had put in for a $35 million contract to design project-management system software, something that would enable the Chinese to organize their work more efficiently. When they met me they were at first dismayed at having been found out, and then became exceptionally discreet. They were well aware that back home the majority of the Canadian public had been appalled by what it knew of the dam, and would not look kindly upon firms from Canada who came to China looking for dam-building business.* But they were far from being alone: it turned out that dozens of other firms from America and Europe and Japan had been scurrying to Yichang in the weeks before, specifically to court business. Still others were expected.
I was shown a list marked ‘confidential’: among the names of those arriving in China and touting for work, or celebrating their having been given some, were General Electric, Hitachi, Mitsubishi, Krupp, Mannesmann, Siemens (who had opened an office in Wuhan), Caterpillar, Nomura, Alcatel, Framatome (the French atomic-power experts, already endeared to the Chinese because of the help they had given to build an equally controversial can-the-Chinese-really-be-trusted-to-run-it nuclear generating station at Daya Bay, thirty miles to the windward of Hong Kong), Atlas Copco, Terex Trucks, Brown Boveri and the Finnish Foreign Trade Association. With assistance from companies like these, the Chinese builders will probably not want – at least in the early stages of building – for earthmovers, dump trucks, compressors, drilling rigs, communications gear, heavy steel construction equipment, turbines, electrical transmission towers, ship lock gates or high-powered diesel engines. The only item in short supply in the early stages of building was likely, it seemed, to be money. Given what is known of the state of the Chinese treasury, the want of $36 billion seemed to put the country at least two sandwiches short of a picnic.
The world's financial community had been extremely leery of the project ever since – and indeed because of – the rebellion in the National People's Congress in April 1992 and since the World Bank had pulled out. But the Chinese met this resistance squarely: they decided to go ahead with construction on their own and by doing so demonstrate that the project would eventually become attractive as an investment, even if it wasn't at the outset. It was an adroit bit of gamesmanship; and when combined with adroitly applied doses of blackmail – suggestions to foreign banks, that if you don't help us finance the dam, you won't get any more business in China at all – it began to work.
The risks of lending money to China are manifold. The country has a total foreign debt of some $90 billion, and a dismal record of welshing that has not endeared her to more prudent minds in the investment community. This particular project, which will take at least seventeen years to complete and will not begin to generate electricity (and thus revenue) until 2003 at the very earliest – and which is plagued by technical opposition, by environmental implications and by massive sociological upheavals – is even less attractive than most. And yet, big American investment firms like Merrill Lynch and banks like Morgan Stanley were early in expressing an interest; while maintaining a discreet distance and the silence of the conclave, they have stuck with the project, offering advice, strategy and, it is assumed, at least promises of eventual funds. Others in America and Japan – Goldman Sachs, Salomon Brothers, Daiwa Securities and Nomura – have taken an interest, too, committing nothing, but keeping their options open and their powder dry. For their part the Chinese offer huge rewards: vast stretches of the Yangtze valley are being opened up to foreign investment, with those who agree to help with the dam being given preference over those who don't.
Politically correct investment strategists have taken a toll on the bankers' enthusiasms, however. A number of investment funds in America now take the view that banks should not invest in environmentally or sociologically unacceptable projects – the Three Gorges Dam being, in their view, a classic of unacceptability. And so they – organizations like New York City Comptroller's Investment Responsibility Office and the Boston-based Franklin Research and Development Corporation – target banks in which they have shares and who are thinking of doing the kind of business of which the shareholders disapprove.
New York's pension funds currently hold $18 million worth of Morgan Stanley shares and $47 million worth of Merrill Lynch: they have clout, in other words. If, following advice from the Investment Responsibility office, the city says it will not touch the Three Gorges project with a bargepole, as it has intimated, then it can bring considerable pressure to bear on the bankers who wish to. Thus is the world becoming more global; in other contexts and from other points of view, thus is it becoming less democratic, thus do international corporations affect the lives of millions, and thus can men in one corner of the world make decisions that have unimagined repercussions on the far side of the planet.
Whether the American and Japanese banks do or do not invest in the project is, for the time being, a moot point. China is raising the first tranches of funding itself, on the domestic market. It has levied a 2 per cent sales tax on all electricity consumed in the country. The Bank of China, the People's Construction Bank, the State Development Bank, all have plenty of foreign exchange and have begun lending it to the dam builders. In Hong Kong, there are countless banks and investment houses who are careless of such niceties as environmental ruin and human suffering – a firm called Peregrine, for example, already doing business in North Korea, professed that it would be ‘fun' to raise money for the Three Gorges Dam. And doubtless firms like Peregrine will end up making money, and will crow lustily at Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley, if indeed these firms bow to what the brokers at Peregrine would see as the wishy-washiness of the greens and the human rights advocates, and decide not to help raise money.
The project, in other words, is going ahead, and now looks unstoppable. Li Peng came down from Beijing to pour the first concrete in December 1994 – at a ceremony to which foreign journalists were pointedly not invited. Some 20,000 workers toil on the site; by the end of 1996 there will be 35,000. Many of the workers are soldiers. Some are said to be prisoners, labouring on the project at no cost. Coffer dams are going up, lock gates are being cast, canals are being dug, diversion tunnels are being blasted. Yichang will soon have its new, international standard airport. There will be new roads and rail links, and a $3 billion network of power lines. The first of the twenty-six generating sets will be ordered soon: most will come from abroad, and every generator maker on the planet is looking eagerly to get the business.
One of the reasons that is put forward, once in a while, to bolster the case against damming the river, is that by doing so the very dignity of the great stream is being violated. Interrupting the river's flow is seen as an insult, these critics say – and one day the river gods, to the detriment of all, will seek to avenge it.
Towards the end of his masterly novella A Single Pebble, John Hersey's narrator, after spending so long among the dangers of the river rapids and after reaching the very upstream end of the Three Gorges, falls prey to the belief in the great river's ancient sanctity. Gazing up at a trackers' path cut into the hard stone of the cliff above him, he starts to reflect:
To begin with, the path was more than a thousand years old, so Su-ling said: Tang dynasty, she said, and perhaps earlier. Chinese rivermen had been satisfied for a millennium – for more than five times the age of my native country – to use this awful way of getting through the Wind Box Gorge. How could I, in the momentary years of my youth, have a part in persuading these people to tolerate the building of a great modern dam that would take the waters of Tibet and Inner China, with their age-old furies, on its back, there to grow lax and benign? How could I span the gap of a thousand years – a millennium in a day?… The sight of the path made me wonder whether a dam was the right thing with which to start closing the gap.
But for all his musings, and for all the opposition to the construction of the Three Gorges Dam, this charming argument is now in fact too late. A dam already has been built, and has stood across the Yangtze now since 1980. It is a low dam – just 150 feet high, a quarter the height of the barrage upstream. It was constructed by a provincial government, with one Beijing ministry working as an ally, and it was done as a dry run, a dress rehearsal, a test bed for the great dam yet to come, and a source of revenue to help pay for it. And in almost all ways it has been a miserable, ugly source of lamentation.
It is called the Gezhouba Dam, and I could just about see it if I leaned out of my hotel window and peered to the right, upstream. The channel along which the cargo ships beat noisily past our hotel was in fact artificial, part of the Gezhouba's downstream architecture; and at night the klieg lights illuminating the dam's three massive ship locks lit up the sky for miles around. There was also a constant sizzling sound in the background, like white noise: it came from high-tension cables that snaked and looped their way out from the dam's powerhouse, and the pylons that radiated in all directions carried tens of thousands of volts and some of them fizzed and sparked with disturbing displays of energy. Not all of them, however: one, a main transmission line to Shanghai, carries no electricity at all – thus presenting a measure of the technical failure that the dam has been.
Up close the dam was a sensationally horrible thing – a 1½-mile-long wall of grey-brown concrete, patched and rust-speckled, caparisoned with gaunt control towers, festooned with sizzling cables. Behind it the river lay placid, captured and seemingly tamed, hemmed in between the rising hills, a strange embarrassment. To build the dam the engineers had had to stop the river's flow for a day and a half in the midwinter of 1981: the immeasurable indignity that John Hersey had suggested, and for a river that had rushed vigorously along for tens of thousands of years. But such things as halting rivers are meat and drink to dam builders worldwide: an aspect of their pathology that makes them want to tame nature, to stop the unstoppable, to demonstrate the power of cold engineering logic when ranged against the brutish and unfocused forces of raw nature. Communist dam builders take this kind of thing even more personally – actually to stop the Yangtze in her tracks was a feat that Mao Zedong felt proud to have overseen, as though he had somehow drawn strength from it, had derived an even greater measure of popular heroism, and still further sanction for the might of his chosen ideology. And Mao had been personally very committed to the Gezhouba project: after all, it had been started in his honour, and in the midst of the Cultural Revolution, on his birthday – 26 December, 1970.
Downstream of the dam, where the sluice gates had been opened, the water gushed and frothed onto the spillways, liberated again, free to feed the great stream below. From the two powerhouses came the hum of the twenty-one great generators that, it is said, were designed to produce 2700 megawatts, enough power to light the houses of 30 million Chinese – or to fulfil the power needs of just 1 million Europeans, for whom electrical power is much more universal a requirement. By any standards the dam is a big one: by the standard of the Three Gorges Dam it is not, however: for every megawatt that Gezhouba is designed to whip from the waters, the big dam is set to produce eight.
The two biggest ship locks were impressive, though, especially from aboard an upriver steamer. I had done the transit several times, and it never failed to awe me, whatever my feelings for the aesthetics of the dam itself. Our ship would nose its way between a cone of flashing buoys to be confronted by the solid concrete wall, looming huge and high. Directly in front was a gateway of two enormous steel doors, so tall it hurt to stare up at their tops.
We would slide gingerly between the gateways, and then into the lock chamber itself, hugging the sides so closely that I could reach out and touch the slimy concrete. Then we were in, along with ten thousand tons of other shipping – empty barges coming up to haul coal downstream, passenger boats, a luxury cruise liner or two, a collection of old motorized ma-yang zi – and the huge doors behind would close silently and swiftly. As soon as they had done so, unseen sluices opened in the base of the two upstream doors and the water in the chamber would rise steadily.
Figures of workers and sightseers who were gazing down at us from high above came closer and closer as the ship rose to meet them, until after only four swift minutes we were up alongside them and exchanging greetings and cigarettes. The waters were still, had stopped rising. Bells rang, lights flashed green. Then the lock chamber's farther doors opened and the telegraph on the bridge rang for ‘Dead slow ahead all’, and we moved slowly out once again – seventy feet higher up in what was now a Yangtze lake, heading into the mountains and the Gorges.
If you were to read the papers and believe the handouts, and if you were to accept the dubious veracity of books like the locally published Large Dams in China (which has, somewhat unsubtly, a picture of the Great Wall covering its front endpapers, and a so far unsullied Three Gorges at the back), you might think that the Gezhouba Dam had been a splendid success, bringing power and promise to the middle Yangtze valley. In fact its building was a shambles, it was much delayed, was hugely over budget, and since being hastily finished has not delivered either the quantity of power or the myriad of other benefits it was supposed to.
Any big building project begun during the Cultural Revolution should have been suspect: and this one was, in spades. The concrete was rotten. The workers were half-hearted. The management was sloppy. The drawings were inaccurate. Mercifully Zhou Enlai, who at times seems to have been the only sane official in the China of those days, managed to halt this project two years after it had been begun, once he became aware how ill designed and dangerous it was. He had it closed for two years: when work began again, the Cultural Revolution was over and more level-headed engineers and managers were in charge.
Even so, it was a full twenty years before the dam was fully ready and generating as much electricity as it could. No power ever reached Shanghai, as had been promised – and the costly transmission lines that went up stand idle. Had Gezhouba been a true dress rehearsal for the Three Gorges Dam, the latter might never have been started. As it is, the big dam assumed a life of its own, with its own political pressures driving it ever forward, and the low dam became a small irrelevance, ugly and damaging and almost useless in its own way – an insult to the river, and a harbinger of the troubles to come upstream.
We went in a truck to have a proper look at the great new dam's site. Seeing it from the river is unsatisfactory: from the navigation channel, a quarter-mile from each bank, the bulldozers look almost vanishingly small and their work insignificant. The ever-present fogs obscure all but the boldest symbols of the dam's approach – gigantic signs proclaiming the glory of the project, extolling the virtues of the workers.* Even so, I made two brief passes by boat this time, just to check on the progress.
I had been there the previous winter and had seen the site through a cold and driving drizzle just before the formal inauguration. Huge rubber hoses extended out into midriver, belching sand onto the river bottom, making shallows where hitherto had been deeps. Excavators crawled along the banks, shoving boulders over the edge and into the water. The fizz and sparkle of welding torches flickered through the gloom, like fireflies.
I was going downstream on one of the Regal China Company's cruising boats, a grand-luxe vessel filled with holidaymakers from far away. I found myself standing on the bridge wing with Norris McWhirter, then editor of the Guinness Book of Records, who was on holiday with a group organized by the British Museum. He gestured at the torn hillsides and the mud-stained riverway and, pathologically unable to resist the superlatives involved, said with an endearingly boyish enthusiasm: ‘Biggest hydroelectric dam in the world, you know.’
He looked a little more, asked me to show him the level to where the water would rise, and then, in tones slightly more serious, said: ‘Probably the biggest bloody disaster, too.’
Six months later, when I went again by ship, the site was more organized, more recognizable as the working of a dam. There were the twin towers of a new bridge, for example, rising a few hundred yards below the dam wall site. And along the left bank, where the bulldozers had been dumping the rocks, a wall of concrete half a mile long: the approach canal for the ship locks, according to the map.
The greatest activity was on the right bank, however. The previous November there had been the island a few score yards off that bank – Zhongbao, the charts had named it, a quarter-mile-long lozenge of an island, rising perhaps twenty feet above the level of the river at high water. Now the island had quite vanished behind a huge coffer dam of rock and gravel and hardcore: it was surrounded by dry riverbed, and crane and drilling rigs were festooned all over it, pouring and pumping cement onto and into it so that before long it would rise as a giant anchor point for the main dam itself. Zhongbao Island was the lynchpin of the entire construction: in a year or so it would be revealed once more, the coffer dams torn down, and construction of the dam proper would begin from its newly reconstituted crown.
Getting permission to visit the dam site was not easy. Lily and I went to the project office and were ushered by a soldier to a quiet and friendly man named Liu Rong Bo, who after the initial cup of tea and thin smile of welcome, wanted to know only one thing: Was I a writer?
I said nothing specific in reply, but reacted with a dramatic expression of distaste. I was a teacher, a historian and researcher, and I had long been interested in the history of the Yangtze River. I had so far travelled all of its length from the Woosung Bar: I planned to travel the rest of its length to the headwaters of Gelandandong on the Tibetan frontier. A visit to this most celebrated dam construction site would be both a privilege and a natural progression for me: I had seen the buoy at the river's mouth, I had seen where the Treaty of Nanking had been signed and where the pagoda at Anqing stood and where Mao had swum between Wuchang and Hankou – could not a visit be arranged? Please.
There was much harrumphing and sucking of teeth, and whispered conversation with an ever impressive, ever persuasive Lily before, at last, a flimsy scrap of paper was written with lines of calligraphy and impressed with a huge scarlet seal of the Three Gorges Project Corporation. A secretary whispered some instructions to Mr Liu and he began to screw the paper into a ball, before Lily, screeching at the secretary for evidently offering some wrongheaded information, snatched the still unscathed sheet away from him and demanded that he sign it. This he did: a slow and painful Liu, a Rong and a Bo – and then, as a gift, another copy of the newly published booklet which Mr Liu had edited, and which was called An Epic Undertaking. (The hotel manager in Wuhan had given me the first copy a few days before.) Thus armed – book, paper and signed seal of approval – we set out for the site, twelve miles away by road.
The journey took four hours. The road vanished after five miles, to be replaced by a track clogged with every kind of construction vehicle, van, bus, taxi, tractor, crane, backhoe, bulldozer, motorcycle and ricksha imaginable. A giant expressway was being built halfway up the mountainside, and a dozen new bridges soared, half-made, across the deep ravines. But meanwhile this single track of mud and crumbling cliff had to do, regulated at its most congested sections by bored policemen who tried to impose a one-way traffic scheme, but broke it all the time for bribes offered by their friends.
More than once we sat in traffic jams caused by broken-down cars. I went up to one: the driver was sitting beside the vehicle, fast asleep. I asked him what was wrong with the car – he had no idea. I opened the bonnet to find that the distributor cap had been knocked off by the bumping and the potholes. I clipped it back on, the car started, the driver got in without a thank-you, and all those waiting around laughed, before climbing back into their own cars.
Bloody cadres!’ exclaimed Lily. ‘No one here cares if they work or not. They just sit around waiting for help, and don't move until they get it. I'm sure it's not like this in New York, is it?’ By way of an answer I repeated the old line about the shortest measurable period of time in Manhattan being that between the moment of getting a green light and the blare of a horn from the taxi driver behind. She got the picture.
The flimsy paper, with its impressive scarlet chop, did us little good. Police and soldiers stopped us for an hour at the entrance gate, and then we were escorted to a headquarters building about a mile beyond. Finally – and once again due largely to Lily's ability to combine a display of well-directed anger, her formidable height and bearing and her highly seductive feminine charm – we were allowed in, unrestricted. No one escorted us, no one followed us. For three hours we were able to walk among the giant bulldozers and excavators, to talk to workers and try to discern something of the plan.
There were 15,500 men at work that day. Half were from the army, and they were all engaged in digging the ship canal, which was being gouged from the left bank, around the northern edge of the dam wall itself. Drilling rigs would buck and screech as they scored countless holes in the rock for the dynamite charges. Every few minutes there would be a soft crump of an explosive charge, and the air would fill with dust, and those fortunate enough to have hard hats would hear the ping of gravel from above. The rest of us knew when to put hands over heads, or when to duck.
The speed with which things were changing was quite literally a subject of awe. I had never been much of an admirer of the Chinese worker: he seemed always to work at half-speed, sleeping whenever he seemed not to be needed. And yet look away – and where he once was, a bridge has risen! a trench has been dug! a building has advanced a floor! The Chinese worker is in this respect just like a snail: you rarely see him in the actual act of moving – but look away for a second, and then look back, and he is somewhere else from where you last remember him, a small trail shows where it was that he went.
From a small knoll of unexcavated rock I could see the entire project, and here, unlike my preconceived idea, there were workers scurrying, antlike and excited, on every part of it. Here I felt that if I stood still for half an hour I would see construction happen before my eyes, like watching the results of time-lapse photography or a slow-motion film. On the far bank they were building the Zhongbao Island coffer dams. On this side there was the ship canal, and down below, close to the river, the footwalls for the main dam itself. Upstream and down were the foundations for the main dam coffers, and in the distance, upstream and down, lights pierced the gloom where concrete-laying machines were lining the entrances and exits of the huge river diversion tunnels.
In a little more than two years the flow of this river – 90,000 cubic yards of water each second – would be halted, for the second time in her long history. China would be told that this was a moment of which to be proud – a precursor to the building of a second great wall, a monument to man's ingenuity. But there are those who remember that the real Great Wall of China was held together by a mortar made of the crushed skeletons of those thousands who died making it. That the Great Wall was built by slaves; there was no choice: it had to be built, or the Empire would lose face.
This new great wall had to be built too. Thousands might die in its building, thousands might die in its aftermath. Animals and plants and peoples would be affected in a myriad of strange and appalling ways. An immense section of China would be affected, and for the worse, by what was going up here. And yet there was no choice here today either. It had to be built, or the new red empire would lose face too. Two thousand two hundred years separated the building of the two walls – two millennia during which the essential nature of China, by this single standard, seemed not to have changed at all.
Lily and I turned back to Yichang, and sought out a small boat master who would take us past the dam site – and this time, into the Gorges themselves. Here I would see at close quarters what was about to be ruined or drowned deep under the soon-to-be-stilled and soon-to-be fouled waters of China's greatest river.