[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
DAM-L LS: Wash. Post: China's Giant Dam Faces Huge Problems (fwd)
----- Forwarded message from owner-irn-three-gorges@netvista.net -----
From owner-irn-three-gorges@netvista.net Mon Jan 8 14:21:32 2001
Return-Path: <owner-irn-three-gorges@netvista.net>
Received: from DaVinci.NetVista.net (mjdomo@mail.netvista.net [206.170.46.10])
by lox.sandelman.ottawa.on.ca (8.8.7/8.8.8) with ESMTP id OAA22947
for <dianne@sandelman.ottawa.on.ca>; Mon, 8 Jan 2001 14:21:30 -0500 (EST)
From: owner-irn-three-gorges@netvista.net
Received: [(from mjdomo@localhost)
by DaVinci.NetVista.net (8.10.0/8.8.8) id f08JEUP19514
for irn-three-gorges-list; Mon, 8 Jan 2001 11:14:30 -0800 (PST)
(envelope-from owner-irn-three-gorges@netvista.net)]
Date: Mon, 8 Jan 2001 11:14:30 -0800 (PST)
Message-Id: <200101081914.f08JEUP19514@DaVinci.NetVista.net>
subject: LS: Wash. Post: China's Giant Dam Faces Huge Problems
Sender: owner-irn-three-gorges@netvista.net
Precedence: bulk
China's Giant Dam Faces Huge Problems
By John Pomfret
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, January 7, 2001; Page A01
YICHANG, China -- When China started building the giant Three Gorges
Dam here in 1993, its leadership sought to use the undertaking -- the
country's most ambitious engineering project since the Great Wall -- to
highlight the superiority of its socialist system. But now, halfway
into the construction, some Chinese officials, engineers and activists
say the project has instead become a testimony to malfeasance,
incompetence and systemic weakness.
Dai Qing, a leading Chinese journalist, has called the project "a black
hole of corruption." Several Chinese engineers, who spoke on condition
of anonymity, expressed concern that construction flaws could trigger a
disaster. Economists said low electricity prices could mean the $24.5
billion project will operate at a deficit. Some environmentalists have
predicted the dam will not really improve flood control on the Yangtze
River. And political analysts have fretted in public that the way local
officials are handling resettlement of 1.3 million people to make way
for the project could lay the foundation for instability and unrest.
"From all angles this project has enormous problems," said one senior
Chinese engineer, who has worked on the project since its inception.
"But China's system, being what it is, doesn't seem to be able to
correct such a massive mistake. Our leaders are worried that if it did,
the regime could fall."
Since winning power in 1949, China's Communist government has used
gigantic projects as a key element of nation-building. Partly because
of China's tradition of using irrigation programs to control its
population, water management and hydroelectric projects have been a
natural choice for a party captivated by political mobilization and
penetration into rural society. By the end of the 1980s, China had
built more than 80,000 reservoirs and hydroelectric plants.
But the Three Gorges Dam towers over them all, so massive it is
difficult to fathom. A visit to the dam site at Yichang, 600 miles
southwest of Beijing in central China, shows a huge concrete wall that
will be 600 feet high and 1.2 miles long when completed. From the top
of a small mountain, thousands of workers laboring on the project look
like ants. Massive tower cranes resemble Tonka toys. A dull roar
emerges from the region, and at night floodlights illuminating the work
can be seen from Yichang's hills for miles.
When completed in 2009, the government says, the Three Gorges Dam will
qualify as one of the biggest construction projects in history. It will
be the largest hydroelectric dam in the world, five times wider than
the Hoover Dam. It will take 26 million tons of concrete to build.
With an estimated capacity of 18.2 million kilowatts, the project is
expected to supply as much as 11 percent of China's energy needs. But
now there is doubt whether Three Gorges' power will turn a profit in a
country enjoying a glut of electricity and falling power prices.
The government has said the dam will improve flood protection along the
Yangtze River. But recently experts have noted that the dam would have
done little to soften the deadly floods of 1998, which occurred mostly
along the tributaries and lower reaches of the Yangtze's proud run.
Because of the project's close association with the leadership -- Li
Peng, No. 2 in the Communist Party, has been the main cheerleader --
criticism has been muted in the Chinese media. Prime Minister Zhu
Rongji has spoken on numerous occasions about improving quality
control, but he also has been tough on critics. Chinese sources said he
told Li Rui, a former water resources minister, to stop criticizing the
dam.
Nevertheless, newspapers have reported that more than $57 million has
been stolen from a fund that is supposed to help relocate the people
who live in areas to be flooded by the dam. Another $24 million, the
reports have alleged, was filched by a contractor who imported hundreds
of used trucks, bulldozers, excavators and loading vehicles but charged
his buyers as if they were new. Hundreds of officials have been
investigated for corruption in connection with the project, 97 because
of misuse of resettlement funds, the reports say.
Reports about construction quality problems have been less frequent and
far less detailed. But in November, the official New China News Agency
said "a number of quality problems have been laid bare in the course of
. . . construction." Concrete blocks at one part of the dam site were
found to be hollow, it said. An accident involving a U.S.-built tower
crane killed three workers in September and halted concrete pouring in
some areas for a month.
"Such accidents have further intensified the existing contradiction
between construction pace and quality control," the news agency said.
The report implied that the China Three Gorges Project Corp.,
responsible for the construction, came late to quality control. It
established a general quality inspection office in August, seven years
after the project began. China's cabinet, the State Council, also set
up an expert group that has "of late relentlessly pointed out some
problems in construction quality," it said, adding that Western
engineers, including an American company, are reviewing the work.
About 400 million people live along the 4,000-mile-long Yangtze River,
most of them downstream from the dam. Any accident could have
disastrous consequences, threatening millions of lives.
Chinese officials contend the dam's environmental impact will be
minimal. But in October, a major state-run daily newspaper alleged that
the dam could turn the Yangtze and a 366-mile-long lake to be created
by the dam into a cesspool.
Behind the dam a vast reservoir, 50 miles longer than Lake Michigan and
up to 580 feet deep, will submerge two cities, 11 county seats and 114
towns. Chongqing, a large urban area with 30 million people, pours 940
million tons of industrial waste water and 245 million tons of domestic
sewage annually into the future site of the reservoir. Only 28 percent
of industrial and 8 percent of urban domestic waste water is treated.
But no issue has been more politically troublesome than resettlement.
That is because, while construction problems can be covered up for a
while or corrected later, the relocation problems have been exposed to
public scrutiny as China's society opens up and people with grievances
go to the courts or seek support in public opinion.
During a recent news conference in Beijing, Three Gorges officials said
that despite widespread reports of corruption in resettlement areas,
the process is moving smoothly. As of July, 248,000 people who lived on
the banks of the Yangtze have been resettled, they said, some as far
away as Shanghai and Xinjiang province in China's vast northwest.
But Strategy and Management, an influential Beijing-based periodical,
warned last year that if resettlement funds are not increased and more
care is not taken in moving people, "the relocation issue . . . will
likely become an explosive social problem, a source of constant social
instability in our country for the first half of the next century."
Groups of angry resettled farmers routinely demonstrate against the
treatment they receive. Thousands have journeyed to Beijing and
provincial capitals seeking support within the higher reaches of
government.
About 500 resettled families have banded together and are asking for
help in Tongliang, 400 miles west of Yichang.
Yan Shugao is one of them. The 63-year-old former orange farmer was
part of a government delegation last March when he first saw the rice
paddies and onion fields of Tongliang, 40 miles northwest of Chongqing.
Yan had an important job to do back then. As a local leader for the
past 30 years in a village on the Yangtze River, Yan had credibility
with the people back home. Yan's task, after seeing Tongliang's sights,
was to tell his neighbors that life in Tongliang was going to be good,
that the soil was fertile, that prospects looked bright.
Good Communist that he is, Yan followed instructions. He and hund
reds of other local leaders returned home after similar expeditions and
convinced their followers that the Chinese government was offering them
a square deal. Move away from their homes in Yunyang county along the
Yangtze to make way for the project, the word went out, and life could
actually improve.
Yan's group dutifully left homes along the cliffs next to the Yangtze
in August. But now they are sorry.
"I was tricked," the father of three said recently. "I feel like I have
let these people down. They trusted me and I let them down. . . . We
are fruit farmers, not rice farmers. We are boatmen and
small-businessmen. There is nothing for us here."
When Yan was brought here in March, he said, he was promised good land
for his group, in complete fields. When they arrived in August, he and
his followers received isolated, small patches set along steep inclines
and at the side of the road, so that one family might be forced to till
as many as four or five plots. It was land none of the local farmers
wanted.
Yan said average income ranged from $250 to $500 a year back home. "Now
it's not clear to me how we are going to make half of that," he said.
Yan and five other families have moved into a rundown, abandoned home
for the elderly that they bought for more than $4,000, an imposing sum
in rural China. When Yan asked whether he could move his small noodle
factory to Tongliang, he was told he would have to pay $600 to hook up
the electricity, ironic for someone resettled to make way for the
world's biggest hydroelectric generator.
Other members of the group said they worried that they would not have
enough money next year to send their children to school. Government
moving subsidies have run out, they said. Most of the villagers are in
debt. Many have sneaked back to Yunyang, where they continue to work in
the deserted orchards and ply boats along the river. A demonstration
that they attempted to hold on Nov. 25 was blocked by the police.
"The central policies on resettlement are generally good," said Huang
Weixiang, a 30-year-old farmer and father of three girls as he showed a
visitor the six small plots of land that made up his allotment. "But on
the local level, things get messed up. We're the weakest link, so
everybody is squeezing us. Really, we want to go home."
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Photos - Share your holiday photos online!
http://photos.yahoo.com/
----- End of forwarded message from owner-irn-three-gorges@netvista.net -----