Three Gorges - Echoing The Legendary Stupidity Of Sanmenxia Dam On The Yellow - FT

[hatrack]

To its opponents, China’s Three Gorges dam on the Yangtze River is all the more tragic because it has a historical precedent. Built in the 1950s, the huge Sanmenxia – literally Three Gates Gorge – dam in central China is today regarded as a catastrophic failure with senior Communist party officials blaming it for many of the environmental and social problems that afflict the region. The Sino-Soviet engineering team that designed it was asked to control flooding, produce electricity and improve transport on the Yellow River – the same ­reasons cited for building the Three Gorges dam, which after 13 years of construction is now nearing completion.

Like the Three Gorges, the Sanmenxia project was supported by China’s Communist party elite, including Mao Zedong, and was built without adequate planning for the potential negative consequences of such a ­radical disruption of China’s second-largest river.

“This dam was really a stupid mistake,” says An Qingyuan, a former Communist party boss of Shaanxi province, the region most directly affected by the project and its aftermath. “We should consider all such projects from a scientific perspective and if it’s not scientific we shouldn’t do these stupid things. It was so stupid, stupid, I say.” Mr An has campaigned for years to have the dam demolished and his condemnation is echoed in the highest corridors of power, even by staunch supporters of the Three Gorges project.

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s soon as the dam was completed, sediment in the murky Yellow River – known for centuries as “China’s sorrow” because of its devastating floods – began to build up behind it, leading the authorities to rebuild the dam within a few years. Despite a complete reconstruction in the early 1960s, sedimentation continued and spread up river, eventually leading to the very floods it was meant to prevent and causing Mao to angrily pronounce that if the dam did not work it should be blown up. By then, more than 400,000 people had been forcefully evicted to make way for the dam and its reservoir and many were living in slum-like conditions in nearby towns. As the river silted up and industrial overuse reduced its flow, large areas of arable land re-emerged from the reservoir, prompting many of the peasant farmers to return to the land to eke out a living. In the mid-1980s, the government officially relocated large numbers of displaced peasants back to their ancestral homes but allocated most of them just a fraction of the land they had left more than two decades before.

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http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ccdd055c-e4c2-11dc-a495-0000779fd2ac.html

[HereSince1628]

1. Until you've stood over it, or passed through it's docks you

really have no idea how big the Three Gorges Dam really is. The reservoir it holds back, the millions of people the reservoir
displaces, the pollution it collects is amazingly large.

The immense weight of the reservoir bows the earth beneath it.

Clever men build boats and bridges. It is not cleverness but arrogance that allows men to command the earth to bow before them.