(April 7, 2001) Dai Qing lives for one thing: to stop China’s Three Gorges dam being built across the Yangtze river. Why? She says it will displace 1.5 million people and cause devastating environmental damage.

But she faces a difficult task. Perhaps an impossible one. Construction of the world’s largest dam is in full flow. And China isn’t in the habit of listening to dissenters, particularly a rocket scientist who abandoned hard-core Communism-and spying for Mao-to find fame as a writer. So shouldn’t she really be doing something else? Fred Pearce went to Beijing and asked Dai if it’s time for a reality check.

Is it true that scientists kick-started the movement against the Three Gorges project?

It began as an issue about upholding the integrity of science. Many big names in Chinese science have opposed the dam since the 1940s when the first plans were drawn up, and many still do. In 1986, scientists from the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Committee, an influential advisory board of 2000 scientists, went to the Yangtze to investigate the project and came back saying no. It was the first time under Communism that scientists as a group had started to say something different to the official view.

How did you get involved?

When these scientists tried to report their findings, they found the government had imposed a news blackout. The leader of the group-Lin Hua, who is now dead-called my mother, an old friend. He knew I was a journalist, working on a paper called Guangming Daily. I was the only journalist who went to meetings of the scientists’ committee. Their arguments sounded reasonable to me. I couldn’t report them, but I was able to warn my editor to be wary about publishing favourable articles on the project.

But in the end your interviews with dissenting scientists did get published.

By 1989, the decision on whether to proceed with the dam was a big political issue, involving many billions of dollars. Yet the independent scientists could not be heard, only the “placemen” whose jobs depended on saying yes. I felt I had no choice but to try to publish. So in January that year, some colleagues and I interviewed nine scientists who had risked their careers by opposing the dam. They were published a month later in an unofficially produced book called Yangtze, Yangtze. Some of the interviewees lost their jobs and the right to publish papers, and one was thrown out of the Communist Party. Three years later, when the National People’s Congress discussed the Three Gorges plan, a third of the delegates refused to support it. This was unprecedented. Normally the Congress passes things by 99 per cent. I am sure the book was partly responsible.

What are the scientists’ main arguments against the dam?

There are many arguments (see “The case against”). That the dam’s main reservoir will silt up. That the dam will not control floods downstream. That the electricity it produces will be so expensive none of the privatised enterprises that are supposed to be its customers will want to buy it. That it will flood huge areas of fertile farmland and hundreds of archaeological sites. That the resettlement of up to 1.5 million people on surrounding hilly land will never work. Scientists say a series of smaller dams further upstream could do the same job more economically.

Yet the dam is well on the way to being built. Isn’t protest futile?

I don’t think so. I will continue my opposition when it is finished. Even then, it will be better if the dam is not used. And a lot will depend on how it is used. Scientists, too, are continuing their protest. Lu Qin Kan was one of the interviewees in Yangtze, Yangtze. He was among a group of Chinese engineers who went to the US back in the 1940s to study how to build the dam. He now leads a group of 43 scientists who have signed a letter asking for the dam’s reservoir to be only partly filled once it is finished.

What’s the point of a partly-filled reservoir? If the dam is being built, why not go the whole way?

If the high-water level is set at 156 metres rather than the planned 175 metres, the authorities will get 85 per cent of the planned power but only displace half as many people. And they will avoid the risk of silting up the harbour at Chongqing, a huge city that will be at the upstream end of the reservoir. It is intended to become the largest inland seaport in the world. But Lu says that as soon as there is a flood on the Yangtze, like we had three years ago, the harbour will probably silt up. So he says they should first partially fill the reservoir and then do studies on siltation.

When you were younger, you were a military scientist and a spy for Chairman Mao. Were you born with the proverbial silver spoon?

Yes, my father worked for the Third International, an association of national communist parties, under Lenin in Moscow. He was a high-level military intelligence officer until he was arrested and secretly killed in prison at the end of the Second World War. When he died I was brought up by his close friend, Marshall Ye. When I grew up in the fifties and sixties, top officials sent their children to study high technology. I went to Harbin Military Engineering College, near the Soviet border, and after graduating I worked on guided missile systems. I was an engineer on the gyroscopes that guide the missiles.

How did you end up as a spook?

In the late 1960s, during the cultural revolution, my husband and I did hard labour in the countryside. But in 1972 I returned to Beijing to work for an institute in the state department of public security. For six years I developed things like lenses for spy cameras. We also imported computer systems to see how they worked. The British wouldn’t sell to us, but the Japanese did. Years later, when I was arrested, my work on spy cameras turned out to be very useful. I soon spotted that the camera in the interrogation cell was hidden in a bunch of artificial flowers.

So when did you start to have second thoughts about the Communist Party?

Things started to change when I had a daughter. There were no good Chinese children’s books back then. So I used my privileged status to get permission to learn some English and began translating English books. Then I wrote my own short story. It became a big hit all over the country and I was suddenly, at the age of 38, a famous short-story writer. The government moved me from computers to intelligence work and I became a spy under the cover of the Chinese Writers Association. It wasn’t long before one of my bosses blew our cover when he got involved with a girl from the CIA. So in 1982 I left and became a journalist.

You were arrested during the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, despite supporting martial law. What happened?

I was in favour of the government imposing martial law over Tiananmen Square. I thought the students should have withdrawn from the square. But I didn’t agree with what happened next, when the tanks went over some students who were withdrawing, and I said so publicly. That was the day, 4 June 1989, when I finally left the Communist Party. I was arrested a month later. One of my relatives, then head of public security, told me later that he knew that I had to be arrested as soon as I set foot in Tiananmen Square. Not for what I was doing that day, but because I was seen as a “bourgeois liberal” because of my writing and what I had done on the Three Gorges. I was held for 10 months without charge and then released.

You’re now free to travel abroad. Is that a sign that the regime is going soft?

I cannot publish in China, so I cannot work as a journalist. For 18 months after my release, I went to the countryside and investigated folk culture, which the authorities allowed. Then I was accepted as a fellow at Harvard University in the US. But I couldn’t get a passport until the US State Department intervened.

What are you writing at the moment?

I spend a lot of time doing translations-everything from love stories to Trotsky’s speeches. I am now translating a book on Japanese experiences in the Second World War. It is all part of my belief that we need to create a society where we know what has happened and can discuss our past openly. The government doesn’t stop me going abroad now. And it allows me to live here, to meet you for instance, to use the Internet and so on. But they tap my calls and sometimes threaten my friends. They say: “She’s on our list. You’d better not contact her”. . . and as you can see, we seem to have someone listening in on us now.

Fred Pearce, New Scientist, April 7, 2001

Further Reading:

Three Gorges Madness: An Interview with Dai Qing

The Three Gorges tax revolt

A Damned Dam

The Chinese government is not telling the whole truth about the cost of the Three Gorges dam