In 1957, 285,000 south Shaanxi peasants voluntarily vacated their land to make
way for a reservoir that would form behind the Sanmen Xia Dam on the Yellow
River.
When the purpose of the dam was changed and the size of the reservoir reduced,
they fought a 30-year battle to return. Back in their homeland, they found
corruption, oppression and poverty at the hands of the local government
entrusted with their fate.
Now, more than half a century later, they and their descendants
continue to pay the price for one of the greatest engineering, environmental
and social debacles in modern history.
It is a history that some in China are not prepared to confront.
Investigative journalist Xie Chaoping was detained on August 19 at the behest
of the local government of Weinan in Shaanxi - and only recently released after
a national outcry - for the crime of telling the story of the serial
embezzlement and mismanagement of relocation-related funds.
The book that provoked his incarceration, The Great Relocation, tells
the history of the Sanmen Xia Dam through the suffering of tens of thousands of
peasants. It also tells a story of a burgeoning crisis on the waterway that
runs through the heart of Shaanxi - the Wei River.
In 2003, many of the "yimin" or "migrants" as they are called, gained a
new distinction as zaimin: victims of a natural disaster.
A catastrophic flood on the Wei River, a major tributary emptying into the
Yellow River 90 kilometers upriver of the Sanmen Xia Dam, inundated the fields
and destroyed the homes of thousands of immigrants.
In a bitter and not entirely unforeseeable irony, their farmland was flooded by
the intentional breaching of a levee to protect the urbanized areas in which
their governmental antagonists reside. The territory of 11 villages was
intentionally flooded and 3,400 households made homeless.
The central government responded quickly, allocating almost 60 million yuan
(US$9 million) for relief. In an all too familiar pattern, little of the money
seems to have made it out of the hands of the local government and into the
distressed areas.
A China Central Television (CCTV) investigation reported that, three years
after the flood, only two million yuan had been expended and 30 homes had been
completed. During the same period, the city government had spent 16 million
yuan on a new office building.
The flood was a galvanizing event, not because of the poor migrants but because
it became clear that not only the county buildings were at risk. Xi'an - the
provincial capital of Shaanxi, a cradle of Chinese civilization, a major
industrial center and an important tourist attraction on the bank of the Wei
River - was also in danger.
The threat to Xi'an sprang from the very same Sanmen Xia Dam that had blighted
the livelihood of the migrants.
The dam was a project of enormous economic, social and political significance.
It was the cornerstone of cooperation with the Soviet Union in the 1950s and a
symbol of the determination of China's new rulers to claim an equal place with
the great emperors and builders of previous centuries.
The dam was designed with the ambitious goal of freeing the Yellow River from
silt - the hundreds of millions of tonnes of silt the river scours from the
loess plateaus of west China and deposits in China's central plain.
The silt raises the bed of the river far above the surrounding land, so that
many of China's richest farmlands and populous cities must literally live in
the shadow of massive levees and the threat of flood every autumn. Since 1950,
China has spent 20 billion yuan in just raising the levees to keep up with the
rising riverbed.
The Sanmen Xia Dam did its job all too well, trapping over a billion tonnes of
silt in its first two years of operation. Four years after the dam was
commissioned in 1960, almost half the reservoir was silted in - a "dead
reservoir" in the parlance of hydrologists.
The issue of Sanmen Xia Dam became a source of intense anxiety as well as
embarrassment to the Chinese government in the 1960s. The dead reservoir was
slowing the flow of water into the Yellow River from the Wei River, building an
immense sandbar at the mouth of the Wei River and forcing the Wei to drop its
own load of silt primarily in its own bed - which rose an astounding 4.5 meters
soon after the dam opened for business.
Meanwhile, an ominous finger of silt crept up the Wei, threatening to cut the
river off from its outlet to the Yellow River and force the Wei to inundate
Xi'an when it needed an outlet for its flood waters.
By 1964, the silt was only 11 kilometers from Xi'an. The rapidly deteriorating
condition became a matter of desperate concern, not just for the Ministry of
Hydrology and the province of Shaanxi, but for the nation's highest leadership.
The government is notoriously loath to admit mistakes, but it confessed that
Sanmen Xia - one of the biggest and most prestigious projects of the early
years of the People's Republic - was a big error.
Then-Chinese premier Zhou Enlai convened a series of conferences on the problem
and engineers came up with a number of of expensive and less than completely
effective fixes. Half the turbines feeding the generators were removed, so
their inlet channels could funnel silt-laden water downstream. Two large bypass
tunnels were built next to the dam for the same purpose.
In the second stage, eight low-elevation tunnels that had originally sluiced
the Yellow River under the dam site during construction and were later sealed
with concrete were unplugged - at a cost of 80 million yuan.
However, it proved very difficult to repurpose a dam designed to retain silt
into one that discharged it. Accumulation slowed somewhat in the reservoir, but
the bed of the Wei remained stubbornly high. The Wei River basin flooded
periodically in the 1990s, but it took the great flood of 2003 to attract
national attention.
In terms of rainfall, the flood was apparently not too remarkable - perhaps a
50-year flood. But it placed an intolerable drainage load on the Wei River,
which vomited its burden into the surrounding farmland.
The intentional levee breach was only one of many; the churning waters,
deprived of their outlet, backwashed and attacked the levee banks. Hundreds of
millions of cubic meters of floodwater inundated villages to depths of two to
five meters. Some 129,000 people were displaced, and direct damage of 2.3
billion yuan inflicted.
Shaanxi's leaders pointed an accusing finger at the Sanmen Xia Dam as the
source of their problems. Clearly, the dam had not solved the flooding problems
associated with the Yellow River; it had simply moved them upstream, away from
Henan, Shanxi and Shandong provinces, and put them behind the dam.
The question was seriously posed, why not just blow up the dam? It is a
solution first proposed by Mao Zedong as he handed the problem over to Zhou
Enlai for solution in the 1960s, and frequently echoed by frustrated Shaanxi
local officials since then.
Previously, the answer had always been that Sanmen Xia, notwithstanding its
dismal history, performed an important role in regulating the flow of
floodwaters down the Yellow River. However, as of 2000, an important impediment
to the decommissioning of the Sanmen Xia Dam was removed with the completion of
the Xiaolangdi Dam downstream on the Yellow River.
The Xiaolangdi Dam, built with World Bank assistance and at a cost of $5.2
billion (with an expenditure of over $1 billion just for relocation and
resettlement of 200,000 displaced peasants), is a direct response to the Sanmen
Xia debacle and the pressing needs of the Yellow River basin.
Xiaolangdi was designed to trap silt - 10 billion tonnes over 20 years - but
also to discharge it. Every year, it emits a spectacular, high-volume discharge
of silt-laden water intended to empty silt from its reservoir, scour and deepen
the riverbed downstream, and sweep the silt all the way to the ocean.
It will take some time before it is known whether the hydrologists' optimism is
justified and Xiaolangdi does not turn out to be another Sanmen Xia. There is
the rather unsettling implication that, although the reservoir is designed to
trap 10 billion tons of silt, engineers haven't quite figured out how to empty
it out of the reservoir.
An environmental website, chinadialogue, reported on this year's desilting
operation:
The silt deposits in the Xiaolangdi reservoir are hard to
shift and, over the next 20 years, some way of dealing with the accumulated
sediment will need to be found. "At that point the silt will be higher and
therefore easier to move, though control of water flow will be harder." [1]
In his book When the Rivers Run Dry, Frank Pearce visited with the
Yellow River Conservancy Commission and learned that a thorough desilting would
require bypassing irrigation, industry and urban consumers, and pumping at
least half of the river's annual flow into the ocean - an impossibility.
The current program of pulsed desilting will stabilize the current, far less
than ideal situation but still leave the lower reaches of the Yellow River
vulnerable to a major flood. Perhaps the best hope for the lower reaches of the
Yellow River is continued drought or the eventual diversion of waters from the
Yangtze.
With Xiaolangdi available to handle the flood load, there were dark mutterings
that Sanmen Xia could have - should have - lowered its reservoir level during
the flood and relieved the pressure on the Wei.
However, the migrants believed that it was more important to the dam's
operators to maintain the reservoir height to sustain the remaining turbines
and keep generating the electricity that brings in hundreds of millions of yuan
of earnings each year.
There are good reasons to suspect the indifference of the Sanmen Xia Dam
operators to the situation upstream. The reservoir and all its problems are in
Shaanxi; but the dam itself is in Henan.
In 1983, the Ministry of Hydrology restructured the dam's operations, bringing
in a Henan power-generating company to run it under the supervision of the
Yellow River Conservancy Commission. The priorities of the Sanmen Xia Pearl
Group Co Ltd, as the outfit is now known, would seem to be profit,
power-generation, downstream flood control, and the interests of Henan.
When delegates to the Shaanxi Provincial People's Congress agitated for
removing the dam, delegates to the Henan Provincial People's Congress
determinedly asserted its importance. The city of Sanmenxia submitted a
petition to the central government, signed by 5,000 citizens, stating that
decommissioning the dam would cost their city annual revenues of 900 million
yuan.
Like most of the migrants' complaints and suspicions, it looks like those
concerning the Sanmen Xia Dam's role in floods will be addressed tardily, if at
all.
The Yellow River Conservancy Commission is adamant that Sanmen Xia be retained.
Its plan to handle a thousand-year flood relies on the coordinated response of
Sanmen Xia, Xiaolangdi and two other dams in Henan. It also asserts that Sanmen
Xia Dam, though perhaps a cause of southern Shaanxi's flood problems, is not
the solution.
According to the conservancy, deforestation and drought are now responsible for
maintaining the stubborn accumulation of silt near Xi'an's doorstep. The
hydrological solution appears to be long term and/or piecemeal: planting and
forestation in Gansu and channeling operations at the mouth of the Wei River.
Meanwhile, the province of Shaanxi has obtained 300 million yuan of flood
control money from the central government with the promise to raise another 300
million internally.
The funds are desperately needed to build levees on the Wei and its tributaries
- levees that were never needed before the construction of Sanmen Xia Dam but
which have been haphazardly and hurriedly raised five times by local concerns
in a race to keep pace with the increasing flood threat.
In his book The Great Relocation, Xie Chaoping quotes a Chinese
hydrologist as writing:
Every dam, good or bad, is a monument. Some
commemorate the achievements of humanity in overcoming and reshaping nature;
others simply show the scars of nature's vengeance on humanity.
And some dams, unfortunately, also commemorate human greed, cruelty and callous
indifference.
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