"The Dam"

Book excerpt

By: Deirdre Chetham

Date: 2002

Source: Chetham, Deirdre. "The Dam." Before the Deluge: The Vanishing World of the Yangtze's Three Gorges. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.

About the Author: Deirdre Chetham is the executive director of the Harvard University Asia Center and a former director of the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research, also at Harvard. She earned a baccalaureate degree in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from Harvard and did graduate work in Chinese Studies at Columbia University. She became interested in the Three Gorges area while serving as a guest lecturer on Yangtze River cruise ships during the early 1980s. Chetham subsequently spent time working for the U.S. Foreign Service in Burma, Beijing, and East Berlin before returning to Harvard in 1996.

INTRODUCTION

The Three Gorges Dam in China is the largest in the world. It stretches more than a mile across the Yangtze River and rises 600 feet (183 meters) above the valley floor. When full, the reservoir it impounds stretches 350 miles (563 kilometers) upriver and contains nearly 1.4 trillion cubic feet (39.6 billion cubic meters) of water. The Three Gorges Dam is a concrete gravity dam. Unlike curved concrete arch dams such as Hoover Dam, which transfer the weight of the water to rock at the edges of the dam, gravity dams rely upon their great mass to resist the weight of the water behind them. Designed for both hydroelectric power generation and flood control, the Three Gorges will ultimately use twenty-six turbines to generate 18.2 million kilowatts of electricity, about one-ninth of China's electricity. The estimated project cost was approximately $25 billion.

Hydroelectric power is generated by using flowing water to drive turbines and generators as the water falls to a lower elevation, much like harnessing the energy of a waterfall. The advantage of a dam and reservoir is that water can be stored when the demand for electricity is low and released to generate electricity when the demand is high. One of the benefits of the Three Gorges Dam is that it will reduce the amount of coal burned to generate electricity, which causes air pollution problems in China. A second benefit is that the dam will decrease the danger of floods, which are estimated to have killed 300,000 people along the Yangtze during the twentieth century. Floodwater is stored in the reservoir and then released slowly over time. Finally, the dam will make river navigation safer and easier by creating a large lake and locks.

The series of three narrow river gorges that give the dam its name have attracted the attention of dam builders since the early twentieth century. A dam was first proposed for the area in 1919, and plans were drawn up by Chinese, Japanese, American, and Soviet engineers over the next sixty years. The Chinese government began construction of a smaller dam, the Gezhouba Dam, in 1970. Construction and engineering problems led to a suspension of activities in 1972, and the Gezhouba Dam was not completed until 1989. The main Three Gorges Dam was approved in 1992 and construction began in 1994. The dam was completed in 2003, at which time the reservoir was partially filled and the first electricity generated. Final project completion and electricity generation at full capacity is scheduled for 2009.

PRIMARY SOURCE

The groundbreaking ceremony for the Three Gorges Dam was held December 14, 1994. After years of discussion and postponement, actually digging a hole in the ground for the dam meant far more than all the approvals and votes and study papers of the past forty years. During the summer and fall of 1994, thousands of peasants from Sandouping left their homes because of the Three Gorges Dam and went off to new villages and towns and factory jobs, and early in 1995, iron and steel bridges and gates, concrete walls and deep passageways began to emerge out of the gargantuan holes and dirt piles. A seventeen-mile road to Yichang, with seven miles of bridges and tunnels and a price tag of U.S. $110 million, cut through the mountains of Xiling Gorge. Yellow and red bulldozers and jeeps rumbled back and forth, still looking odd and out of place to people sailing by below. From opposite banks, the two ends of what would become the first bridge in the gorges stretched out to reach one another. At 2,950 feet, it is the longest suspension bridge in China, except for the Tsing Ma airport bridge connecting Hong Kong to Lantau Island, completed in 1997.

Three years after the groundbreaking, Chinese President Jiang Zemin and Premier Li Peng took part in the celebration to mark the damming of the river and the opening of a diversion channel that would permit river traffic to continue without interruption during construction on the riverbed. The diversion of the river, which ended the first phase of construction of the project and allowed work on the actual dam site to begin, had originally been planned for 1998, but the date was moved up so that this event and Hong Kong's return to China could take place in the same year. A local publication described the event:

"On November 8th, 1997 a slight fog filled the Xiling Gore and a warm wind blew gently. At nine o'clock, Premier Li Peng ordered the start of the closure at the work site near the dragon's mouth. Three signal flares sent up by the vice-general rose to the sky, and instantly trucks on the four embankments of the upper and lower coffer dams approached the dragon's mouth like powerful lions. More than 4,000 giant loading trucks poured stones into the dragons' mouth, like thunder. The dragon's mouth was narrowed to 30m, 20m, 15m, 5m…. The dam site had a grand, festive atmosphere. An enormous five-star red flag made up of woven blankets covered a space of 1,080 square meters and looked magnificent from the reviewing stand."

In his speech that afternoon, President Jiang Zemin emphasized the benefits of the dam and extolled China's long and successful history of combating nature.

Since the dawn of history, the Chinese nation has been engaged in the great feat of conquering, developing, and exploiting nature. The legend of the mythical bird Jingwei determined to fill the sea with pebbles, the Foolish Old Man resolved to move the mountains standing in his way, and the tale of the Great Yu who harnessed the Great Floods are just some of the examples of the Chinese people's indomitable spirit in successfully conquering nature. The scale and overall benefits of the water conservancy and hydropower project we are building today on the Three Gorges of the Yangtze River, which have no parallel in the world, will greatly promote the development of our national economy and prove to be of lasting service to present and future generations. It also embodies the great industrious and dauntless spirit of the Chinese nation and displays the daring vision of the Chinese people for new horizons and a better future in the course of their reform and opening up.

If you ask people in the gorges what they think about the dam, the most common first answer is "it will be very big!" (bao da!). If you wonder what the area will be like once the dam is finished or how life will change, responses vary but reflect the widespread belief that most people in the cities will be better off, and that many in the country-side will not. Whatever does happen, and expectations for the future tend to be vague here, everyone agrees that it will be out of their control. Though where everyone in the way of the water will go and how this happens is crucial to the dam's success or failure, many young people project a deep indifference. "We'll all be gone," says a young woman in her early twenties, sucking on a purple popsicle outside a shop in Shibao Block, "and it doesn't matter." "It will be fun when we all move" states a chambermaid from the Wushan Hotel with enthusiasm. Pressed to explain why, she giggles and says everything will be new. The opinion of a local schoolteacher traveling third class on a local ferry is that the dam will cause widespread hardship but is necessary to bring economic development. He sees no other choice. "The people are bitterly poor and we have to do something." An assistant dockmaster in Zigui is more fatalistic and fed up. "Who knows what the dam will do in the long run, or what will become of the people. It's the cadres who make the decisions and take the money and work things out to suit themselves." The refrain from the local travel service is consistently and officially positive. Despite the tremendous cultural loss, the local offices of the China International Travel Service tout the enhanced scenery that will result when the water level is raised. A big lake will be more beautiful, and once-inaccessible spots will become easy-to-reach tourist destinations on newly created rivers.

The Three Gorges Dam will certainly be big. At the height of 607 feet, it will be about as tall as a 60-story building, and stretch 1.45 miles across the Yangtze, five times as long as the Hoover Dam. Twenty-six huge turbines will generate 18.2 million kilowatts of energy, comparable to the output of eighteen nuclear power plants and eight times greater than that of the Aswan Dam in Egypt. The reservoir's water level will rise to 574 feet, with an average increase in the water level within the gorges of about 290 feet, creating a 360-mile reservoir stretching from the dam site to Chongqing. About the length of Lake Superior, this will be the largest man-made body of water in the world, with a capacity of 11 trillion gallons. Once the Wuhan Bridge is somehow altered to allow taller ships to pass underneath it, 10,000-ton vessels will be able to sail through twin 65-foot-high five-stage locks, assisted in their passage by the highest ship elevator in the world. Construction of the dam will require over 10 billion pounds of cement, 4.24 billion pounds of rolled steel, and over 56 million cubic feet of timber. Two billion cubic feet of rock were blasted away to carve out space for the massive locks alone; 240 square miles of land will be flooded, submerging at least thirteen cities, 140 towns, 1,350 villages, 657 factories, and approximately 74,000 acres of cultivated land under about 300 feet of water. Some 1.2 million people may eventually be moved away from those towns, factories, and farms.

Although each of the Three Gorges will be affected by the new dam, as will the towns and countryside as far away as Chongqing, no place has or will suffer greater change than Xiling Gorge, the easternmost part of which will be totally destroyed. In the fifth century, Li Daoyuan, a scholar of the Northern Wei dynasty wrote,

"About fifty kilometers east of the Yellow Cow shoal is the mouth of the Xiling Gorge. Here, the landscape features high peaks and winding waterways, the flanking mountains being so high that sunshine can filter in only at midday and moonlight can come only at midnight. The precipitous cliffs tower thousands of feet and bear colorful streaks with myriad images. Ancient and tall trees abound. Apart from the singing streams, one can hear clearly the echoing wails of monkeys inhabiting the mountains."

For 1,500 years, this remained almost unchanged, and in the space of a decade it has become unrecognizable.

The numbers of tons of earth do not begin to convey the enormity of the construction and destruction, the walls of concrete as high as skyscrapers in the midst of what will soon be remembered only from old photos. The sounds are different too. The moneys are long gone, and so are the shouts of the boatmen, for it has become too dangerous for sampans and other small craft to maneuver around the dredges and cranes, and the gurgling of the river has been drowned out by the rhythmic slam of pressure drills. On one side of the riverbank, slogans in huge red characters declare, Yiliu guanli, yiliu zhiliang, yiliu shigong, wenming jiansbe (Top-rate management, top-rate quality, top-rate workmanship, and civilized construction), on the other, Kaifa sanxia, fazban changjiang! (Open the Three Gorges, develop the Yangtze!).

Worldwide, there are now over one hundred dams with heights over one hundred meters (equal to 328 feet). Their reservoirs cover more than 230,000 square miles, and have a total water capacity of 212 billion cubic feet, equivalent to 15 percent of the annual runoff of the world's rivers. With the exception of the Zaire, the Amazon, and rivers flowing into the Arctic, all of the earth's thirty largest rivers have been dammed; these include the Ganges, Panama, Tocantis, Columbia, Zambezi, Niger, Danube, Nile, and Indus. The Three Gorges Dam will generate 50 percent more power than the Itaipu Dam in Paraguay, currently the world's largest dam. Despite a worldwide trend against building mega-dams, a consequence of the environmental damage and social problems resulting from many of the projects listed above, the Chinese government views the Three Gorges Dam as the most effective method of energy generation and flood control along the Yangtze, as well as a way to improve transportation to the interior of China and jumpstart the economy in one of the country's poorest regions.

By 2009, the dam should provide 10 percent of China's total electric power supply, but most of the newly generated power will go to the eastern cities and provinces of the Yangtze River delta. Power originally designated for Chongqing will instead be sold to Guangzhou, and any deficiency in Chongqing will be made up by the Ertan Dam in southwestern Sichuan. The Three Gorges region will receive little of the electricity and, at least for the time being, has little need of it, for there has been a power glut in most of Sichuan since the mid-1990s, the result of increased production by small generating stations and the closure of many large state-run factories. Nonetheless, blackouts and brownouts are still common, mainly because of unequal distribution rather than lack of supply. Even if electricity from the Three Gorges were to become available locally, it would not necessarily be welcome. Many county officials do not want electricity from the dam, for they fear it will result in the closure of local power-generating stations, and consequently the loss of tax revenue, greater unemployment, and generally higher electricity rates.

Though some foreign calculations run up to U.S. $30 billion and higher, in early 2001 the Chinese government put the anticipated cost of the dam at 180 billion yuan (U.S. $21.74 billion), almost all of which is coming from domestic sources. This is 23.9 billion yuan (U.S. $2.89 billion) less than the 203.9 billion yuan (U.S. 24.63 billion) predicted in 1994. One hundred billion yuan, or close to 50 percent of the original estimate, is being raised directly from a .7 fen (.08 U.S. cents) per-kilowatt tax levied on electricity on all homes and businesses in developed regions of China. (Less-developed areas are charged .3 fen and the poorest counties are exempt.) Revenue from the Gezhouba Dam is providing 25 percent of the funding. A ten-year, 30 billion yuan (U.S. $3.6 billion) loan was granted by the China Development Bank, established in 1996 to fund state-owned enterprises and major infrastructure projects, including, in particular, the Three Gorges Dam. The remainder of the financing comes from export credits and corporate bonds, some of which have been purchased by U.S. financial institutions despite significant opposition and pressure from American environmental activists. In 2003, when the first turbines begin generating energy, the Three Gorges project will begin contributing to its own support and will eventually pay for about 7.5 percent of the total cost. While China had originally hoped for outside financing, the World Bank and other international financial institutions declined to provide assistance because of concerns about the environmental impact of the dam. Financial investment from the United States has been limited compared to that from Europe and Asia because of a 1996 decision by the Export-Import Bank of the United States not to offer credit guarantees (generally required by China) to American companies wishing to provide equipment or services to the Three Gorges project. Despite this, U.S. companies, either acting directly or through overseas subsidiaries, have still managed to do over U.S. $100 million worth of business related to the project, and there has been no shortage of interest from major engineering and construction companies throughout the world.

In part to simplify the administration of central government and other funds coming into the Sichuan side of the gorges, as well as to coordinate the population relocations and infrastructure development, in 1997 the city of Chongqing was elevated to the level of a municipality, like Beijing, Atianjin, and Shanghai, and enlarged to include the counties of the Three Gorges as far east as the Hubei border. Chongqing municipality, no longer a part of Sichuan province, now reports directly to the central government. Wanxian, which had administrative responsibility for most of the Three Gorges counties from 1992 to 1997, was renamed Wanzhou, or Wan district (though many people still call it Wanxian), in 1998. Also referred to as the Wanzhou Resettlement Development District (Wanzbou Yimin Kaifa Qu), it includes Fengjie, Wushan, Wuxi, Yunyang, Kaixian, and Zhongxian counties, and reports to the Chongqing government.

The biggest question about the dam is whether or not it will be successful in reducing flooding in the middle reaches of the river, where most of the worst floods occur and the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of people living behind the Jingzhou Dike on the flat farmland of Hubei are threatened. Such floods happen during the summer rainy season when there is a sudden infusion of water from tributaries, usually the Han and Huai rivers near Wuhan, and the Yangtze is already rising rapidly as melting snow swells its uppermost regions. The Yangtze flows from west to east. In late spring and summer, rainfall along the river moves in the opposite direction, from east to west. Heavy rains often fall in central China, in Hubei and Sichuan, in mid-summer, coinciding with the time when the Yangtze is already at its highest. Several situations can lead to catastrophic floods: excess water entering the Yangtze from its tributaries, too much water flowing from the upper Yangtze above Chongqing into the gorges and the middle reaches of the river below, or a combination of these circumstances. While concurring that the Three Gorges Dam will have some impact on flooding by limiting the flow out of the reservoir area, and thus reducing the overall volume of water below Yichang, many experts argue that a dam in this location can only be effective in preventing disasters caused by flooding in the upper reaches. The flood of 1870, considered a "thousand-year flood" (a flood which is so rare that statistically it should occur only once every thousand years), is an example of what happens when there is far too much water pouring into both the upper Yangtze near Chongqing and the gorges and the middle Yangtze (from the tributaries) simultaneously. A dam located in Sandouping might have reduced the damage caused by a flood of this sort by containing the water from the upper reaches of the river in the reservoir.

The hundred-year floods of 1954 and 1998, in contrast, were the result of water pouring into the Yangtze from tributaries below Yichang. Critics claim that when the tributaries are the source of flooding, lowering the reservoir's level above the tributaries, in anticipation of the increased volume of water up-river, will not significantly improve the situation, certainly not enough to justify the building of a huge dam with so many other problems and potentially negative consequences. Supporters claim that it will. A reservoir provides flood control by working like a sink, allowing water that enters it to be drained at a controlled rate, rather than overflowing unexpectedly. Before the rainy season, the reservoir level can be lowered, providing additional storage capacity that will prevent flooding in this region and below the dam. If, however, the increase in the water level below the dam from the tributaries in the middle reaches of the Yangtze is so great as to cause flooding, a dam above may reduce the scope the disaster, but it will not prevent it.

SIGNIFICANCE

Despite its projected benefits, the Three Gorges Dam has been a controversial project. It has flooded cities and towns along a stretch of the Yangtze River known for its scenic beauty, requiring more than one million people to be relocated. Prime farmland along the river bottom will be flooded and the remaining land above the reservoir is too steep for farming. Critics of the project also point out that the Yangtze functions as a sewer, carrying human and industrial waste downstream. Once the dam is completed, it may impound a reservoir of heavily polluted water. The Yangtze also carries a heavy load of silt, which will eventually fill the reservoir if it is not continuously removed. A final concern is that poor construction standards may create an unsafe dam that could fail catastrophically. In response to environmental and safety concerns, both the World Bank and the U.S. Export-Import Bank refused to issue loans and loan guarantees for the project.

The Three Gorges Dam is controversial in large part because it was built during a time when the wisdom of large dams in general was being called into question. Had the technology, capital, and expertise existed to build the dam when it was first proposed in 1919, it would have likely been regarded an engineering triumph. Although John Muir and others protested construction of the Hetch Hetchy Dam in Yosemite National Park during the early years of the twentieth century, there was virtually no opposition to major projects such as the Hoover Dam during the middle twentieth century. Unanticipated environmental problems after construction of the Aswan Dam in Egypt, which disrupted the beneficial flooding of the Nile River, and an increasing interest in environmental issues during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have made all large dam projects controversial.

Controversies involving large dams are difficult to resolve because they typically include intangibles such as the loss of scenic areas and archeological sites. Can a future reduction in air pollution and lung disease be fairly weighed against the value of scenic beauty, cultural heritage, or the disruption of lives in inundated areas? Other difficulties include accurate projection of benefits such as flood control, which involve complicated calculations and many assumptions, so that they can be compared to project costs.

FURTHER RESOURCES

Web sites

British Geomorphological Research Group. "The Big Dam Debate, Case Study: Three Gorges Dam, China." 〈http://www.bgrg.org/pages/education/alevel/tgd〉 (accessed January 27, 2006.

Public Broadcasting System. "Great Wall Across the Yangtze." 〈http://www.pbs.org/itvs/greatwall〉 (accessed January 27, 2006.

WGBH Educational Foundation. "Building Big: Databank: Three Gorges Dam." 〈http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/buildingbig/wonder/structure/three_gorges.html〉 (accessed January 27, 2006.