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2 Three Gorges Dam crisis in
slow motion By Peter Lee
Dams
are big and stupid things. The Three Gorges Dam on
China's Yangtze River is bigger and stupider than
most, so it attracts a lot of criticism. Much of
the criticism is deserved. Some of it - such as
accusations that it has significantly exacerbated
the drought gripping China - is, perhaps,
undeserved.
All of the criticism,
however, is an important harbinger of mounting
political problems for China's authoritarian model
of national development.
The
Three Gorges Dam, or TGD, is very much the bastard
child of the Tiananmen democratic movement of 1989
and the ensuing crackdown.
Popular activists, led by
author Dai Qing, tried to stop the dam in
the name of transparency,
accountability and democracy. After Tiananmen, the
Chinese government built and promoted the dam as a
symbol of the government's determination to pursue
economic development over political reform and in
the teeth of international economic sanctions.
TGD
was also a public vote of confidence in then
Chinese premier Li Peng, who was at the time
internationally excoriated as "The Butcher of
Beijing" for ordering the crackdown. Li, trained
as a hydropower engineer, was an enthusiastic
advocate for the project, and allegedly had strong
family as well as professional and public interest
in the construction of the dam.
Because of its potent
symbolism, negative reporting on the dam was
actively discouraged in the Chinese national press
for two decades.
Therefore, it was significant
news when the State Council, China's cabinet, went
public recently with the information that it was
necessary to throw another 20 billion yuan (US$3
billion) or so at the Three Gorges in order to
deal with landslide, pollution and relocation
issues.
Most probably, the State
Council announcement reflected the priorities of
Premier Wen Jiabao. Wen, who is responsible for
projecting the friendly, caring face of the
Chinese government, has made it his priority to
respond to popular dissatisfaction with bloated,
destructive hydropower projects promoted by greedy
local governments and powerful national utilities.
Famously, Wen pulled the plug
on the Leaping Tiger Gorge Dam in 2008, after
reading an investigative report by Liu Jianqiang
in the Guangzhou-based Nanfang (Southern) Daily
blasting the rogue project.
The
Western press, however, decided not to spin the
State Council announcement as "China's government
makes a belated but welcome step toward
transparency and public engagement by breaking
silence on TGD problems".
Instead, some outlets decided
to use the Yangtze basin drought as a news hook
for the story. As the Washington Post reported,
"Amid severe drought, Chinese government admits
mistakes with Three Gorges Dam." [1] CNN pitched
in with "Has the Three Gorges Dam created Chinese
drought zone?" [2] Associated Press: "China
drought renews debate over Three Gorges Dam." [3]
In example of the bloggy "it
would be irresponsible not to speculate" writing
that news outlets increasingly turn to in order to
fill their pages and attract readers, Elaine
Kurtenbach of AP reported the allegation that
"many villagers and some scientists suspect the
dam ... could also be altering weather patterns,
contributing to the lowest rainfall some areas
have seen in a half century or more."
A
modicum of research - ie recollecting that the
Yangtze experienced one of the biggest floods in
its history in the not-too-distant past, that is
to say 10 months ago - casts doubt on this
particular exercise in empirical inquiry.
The
Yangtze River basin historically has a surplus of
water, not a dearth, and this situation is likely
to persist. Research on the effects of climate
change on the Yangtze River basin predicts that
global warming - not the TGD - will bring more
rainfall in brief, more intense episodes from the
summer monsoon. It was therefore undoubtedly a
matter of considerable but not unexpected relief
to the government as Xinhua reported that the
drought broke under torrential rains - as much as
10 inches in some localities.
In a
sure sign of the journalistic apocalypse, it fell
to China's leading purveyor of knuckleheaded
nationalism, Global Times, to provide some useful
perspective on the purported TGD/drought link: it
interviewed Zhang Boting, deputy general secretary
of the China Society for Hydropower Engineering,
obviously a hardcore dam enthusiast.
Zhang harrumphed:
It is absurd.
There are more than 20 dams in the world larger
than the Three Gorges Dam. But I never heard of
them causing droughts. The big flood last year
could be a good refutation of this claim. It is
impossible for it to cause both drought and
flood. [4]
Beyond straw-man issues of
climate pseudo-science, the TGD operators did hog
water last year in order to achieve the first-time
fill of the reservoir to the 175-meter maximum, on
the not unwarranted but unfulfilled assumption
that spring rains would cover the temporary
downstream shortage.
The government subsequently
admitted that the large, shallow lakes that form
flood basins in the middle Yangtze - particularly
Boyang and Dongting Lakes - were lower than usual
as a result and dried up dramatically during the
unprecedented drought, exacerbating local
hardships.
There is also the issue of
whether the reputedly greedy and callous operators
of the TGD hydropower station resisted releasing
drought-relief water from the dam so that optimum
head for power generation (and profits) could be
maintained. They probably did, and it took a
highly publicized directive from the Chinese
government to open the floodgates and send 3.7
billion tonnes of water (about 10% of the
reservoir's capacity) downstream.
But
this is an operational issue - and the practical
assistance the release provided to (and the woes
the late 2010-early 2011 reduced flows inflicted
upon) the Yangtze's vast drought-crippled middle
and lower reaches is questionable.
The
underlying fact is that the dam gives Chinese
planners additional flexibility in managing
storage and release of water to adapt to extremes
in rainfall and drought.
The
prognosis for China, therefore, is more dams, not
fewer, as Dr John Yin, a hydrologist at the
University of San Diego, told Asia Times Online:
I believe that
these recent extreme events will provide
ammunition to those who want to build more large
dams for increasing storage capacity to handle
flooding and/or water shortage
problems.
Disregarding the drought red
herring, the past history and present
circumstances of the Three Gorges project point to
important structural issues for China's politics
and economy, including problems that neither the
projects supporters or critics originally
anticipated.
Public policy advocates, like
generals, sometimes find themselves refighting the
last war instead of understanding and mastering
the current battlefield.
The previous
Waterloo of Chinese hydrology was the San Men Xia
Dam, a gigantic failure for which Chairman Mao and
his immense hubris were directly responsible.
Built on the Yellow River with Soviet assistance
in the 1950s and desperately and expensively
repaired by China alone in the 1960s, it consumed
a disproportionate share of the national budget
and served as a drag on economic growth.
Improperly sited and designed,
the dam's reservoir silted up almost immediately.
Rivers feeding the reservoir slowed and dumped
their sediment, raising beds and increasing flood
risk. Within months, Shaanxi's capital, Xian,
faced the real threat of inundation in the next
major flood.
Hundreds of thousands of
people were displaced from rich Shaanxi farmland
and relocated into hopeless desolation. Their
50-year struggle to return and obtain fair
compensation and treatment is documented in Xie
Chaoping's samizdat epic, The Great Relocation. [5]
History looked primed to
repeat itself with the Three Gorges Dam, a dream
of Sun Yat-sen's that had been adopted as the
Chinese Communist Party's national priority in the
1980s.
As political ferment and
demands for more transparent and responsive
government swept China in 1989, Dai Qing elevated
opposition to the TGD to a national crusade. She
prepared a compendium of articles and interviews
titled Yangtze!
Yangtze! to distribute to delegates to the
National People's Congress and support efforts to
block construction of the dam. The book was
suppressed and Dai was imprisoned for several
months post-Tiananmen.
Yangtze! Yangtze! was a
carefully researched brief designed to demonstrate
that citizen activists could do a better job of
guiding China's hydraulic policy than the bespoke
hacks in the Ministry of Water Resources. Its case
against the dam touched on many issues, but
primarily invoked the San Men Xia fiasco on the
issues of unsupportable cost and catastrophic
sedimentation.
Dai was wrong about the cost
of the dam construction hindering China's growth.
China not only built its dam; over the next 20
years, it was also able to over-invest in
virtually every civil and industrial asset known
to humankind.
The Chinese government also
demonstrated it could deploy significant
technical, financial, and political resources on
the construction of enormous and successful dams
throughout China, implying the capability to
manage the critical problem of TGD sedimentation.
In 1993, Dai Qing interviewed
Huang Wanli, the only Chinese hydrologist brave
enough to buck Chairman Mao and his coterie and
refuse to endorse the San Men Xia dam during its
approval phase. He told Dai that Three Gorges,
unlike San Men Xia, was located in a "scouring"
zone rather than a "deposition" zone.
In
other words, the TGD reservoir could theoretically
be flushed out with intermittent high flow release
of sediment-laden water. However, as a practical
matter, the coarse gravel and rocks carried
through Sichuan in the Yangtze could not be
flushed out because of their size and weight, and
the reservoir would silt up. Then, in a replay of
the Xian crisis, Chongqing's port of Jiulongpu,
near the west end of the TGD reservoir, would
become unusable within 10 years.
The
jury is apparently still out on the sedimentation
issue. And China's government, in contrast to its
frantic, underfunded approach to the San Men Xia
debacle, is throwing a lot of resources at the
Three Gorges problem before it becomes untenable.
But things don't look particularly good.
In
2004, environmental journalist Liu Jianqing penned
an investigative report that stripped away much of
the optimistic public relations fa็ade erected by
the Chinese government. He revealed that
landslides were a much more severe problem than
originally advertised, and the number of people
who might have to be relocated from unstable parts
of the reservoir might be double the original
estimate and reach 2.3 million.
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