Paradise lost at Tiger Leaping Gorge
By Antoaneta Bezlova
LIJIANG - The town at Tiger Leaping Gorge is a ghost town. Clusters of new
apartments in mock-Tibetan style with whitewashed walls and ornate flat roofs
sit empty, with gaping windows. The newly widened streets are free of traffic
and the surrounding beauty of nature makes for an eerie contrast to the
emptiness of the place.
Nestled in the folds of the snow-peaked mountains of Shangri-la and perched
over the rushing waters of Jinsha River, the place is so picturesque that it is
no surprise that it was picked as the perfect retirement spot for local
government officials.
They too wanted to retreat from the world in the paradise that
English writer James Hilton made famous in his 1933 fantasy novel Lost Horizon.
"They [officials] all bought properties here," says Xiao Luo, a local tour
guide from the Naxi minority. "These buildings are all new and were all built
for retired cadres. But no one dares yet to come and live here. If the dam gets
built this whole area will be flooded."
The dam Xiao Luo speaks of is at Tiger Leaping Gorge, which is so narrow a
tiger once supposedly leapt across it. And the gorge itself - one of the
deepest river canyons in the world on the upper reaches of Yangtze River - or
the Jinsha, is almost as famous as China's Three Gorges. It is home to diverse
people such as the Naxi, Tibetan, Yi, Han and Zhang ethnic groups. Western
explorers like Joseph Rock made its magnificent scenery, flora and fauna
internationally famous at the turn of the last century.
Asia's great rivers, the Yangtze, the Mekong and the Salween, all rise in the
high Himalayan Plateau and flow in parallel through this corner of China's
Yunnan province. The remote beauty of the place is such that it reportedly took
the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization's World
Heritage committee less than 20 minutes to decide to include The Three Parallel
Rivers National Park on the World Heritage list in 2003.
The honor came to underscore the fragile beauty of a place that has survived
endless logging campaigns and the resettlement of hundreds of thousands of
newcomers during the three decades of rule under communist chairman Mao Zedong.
He believed that "man must conquer nature" rather than live in harmony with it.
But a new threat to the area's rich diversity resurfaced in 2004 when the local
government announced it wanted to build a dam and power station on the scenic
spot of Tiger Leaping Gorge.
Since then the movement against the dam has become a focal point for nascent
environmental activism. The opposition against the project rallied local
peasants, national media and green groups in a rare demonstration of defiance
against powerful lobbies of energy developers and development-oriented
officials.
Villagers even sent a signed petition to Beijing pleading with the central
government to roll back the project which would evict some 100,000 farmers from
their land.
Such was the national outcry against the damming of the unspoiled gorge that
Beijing appeared to bow to public demand and suspended the project. Premier Wen
Jiabao ordered an environmental review of the dam and an investigation into
allegations of unapproved construction. Since then, reporting on the fate of
the project has died down and local protests have been muzzled.
"There has been a change of parlance," explains local environmentalist Yu
Xiaogang.
"Local officials no longer talk of building dams but of transferring water from
the Jinsha River to relieve the lack of water in the provincial capital of
Kunming. Water transfer projects don't generate money and no one can accuse
them of being profit-minded."
The original plan to build a dam on the Tiger Leaping Gorge has been replaced
with a new one to dam the Jinsha at Longpan. The precise location of the dam -
still under discussion - is proposed to be about 150 km upstream of the Tiger
Leaping Gorge. All other details such as the building of a cascade of seven
other dams downstream remain in place. The proposed series of dams and power
stations is supposed to generate 88.3 billion kilowatts of electricity a year.
Last November, Yunnan provincial governor Qin Guangrong described the planned
water transfer plan to central Yunnan as the "most expensive and difficult
engineering project" undertaken by the province since the communist takeover in
1949.
"The proposed water transfer project can only be realized if all eight dams on
the Jinsha are built," says Yang Yong, a geologist who studies the development
of water resources in China's western provinces. "That leaves little doubt that
if the government is serious about supplying water to Kunming, the project
would go ahead."
Apart from relieving the lack of water in central Yunnan, the proposed damming
of the Jinsha is aimed at diverting water to Kunming to clean up the
notoriously polluted Dian Chi Lake. The lake was once one of Asia's biggest
freshwater lakes, but over the past 50 years it has shrunk to a third of its
former size and silted up.
Yunnan has spent billions of dollars on reducing pollution in the lake with
little to show in terms of results. Dian Chi is suffering from algae blooms
that are destroying the lake ecosystems by depleting the water's oxygen
content. Now as the capital Kunming expands, the province is preparing to
invest even more - 49 billion yuan (US$7.2 billion) - on a costly water
diversion project from the Jinsha River.
"The length of the diversion project is nearly 600 km, which makes it expensive
and difficult," says Yu Xiaogang who runs the Kunming-based NGO Green
Watersheds. "Local officials have mobilized a lot of propaganda to justify the
cost. They say the livelihoods of 10 million people in central Yunnan are worth
the uprooting of 100,000 people at the Tiger Leaping Gorge."
The new site for Longpan dam is supposed to result in the displacement of less
people - an estimated 20,000 mainly minority residents - than the original plan
for the Tiger Leaping Gorge dam. Experts say the impact on forests and the
ecological diversity of the area would be equally severe. They suggest there
are other potential solutions to the lack of water in central Yunnan that could
minimize the need for water diversion from the Jinsha.
"There has been an explosion of energy-intensive industries in the province in
recent years, many of them transferred from the eastern coastal areas where
both power and resources are being slowly depleted," says Yang Yong. "One needs
to treat the existing pollution first and keep the growth of polluting
industries in check before green-lighting such (water diversion) projects".
A stop at the ancient trading town of Shigu, where the Yangtze River makes its
first bend, reveals that local residents are unhappy about their success in
fighting the pending dam project. Authorities are wary of protests against the
dam. Three police cars patrol the small market place and the steps to a grand
monument dedicated to Red China's Long March.
"Policemen watch us all the time," says local woman Chen Jing furtively. "They
don't like us talking to foreigners and outsiders very much".
The spot is a tourist destination. It is here, in 1235, that Kublai Khan
floated his invading Mongol armies across the Yangtze river on inflated rawhide
bags. It is also here - at Shigu - that the guerrilla armies of Chairman Mao
crossed the fast waters of Yangtze during their Long March up north in the
1930s.
But while locals sell fruits and hand-made trinkets to the tourists they avoid
chatting with them. The atmosphere feels tense.
"Everybody is still unsettled about the dam," a shopkeeper selling funeral
wreaths, who gives her name as He, shares reluctantly. "People are poor and
they don't want to be made to give up their land to move up the hills. There is
nothing much they can grow there."
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