John Ridding
The Financial Times
April 24, 2002
All the world is drunk, And I alone am sober. Qu Yuan, 340BC-277BC

I have just drunk the waters of Changsha, And come to eat the fish of Wuchang. Now I am swimming across the great Yangtse, Looking afar to the open sky of Chu. Let the wind blow and the waves beat, Better far than idly strolling in a courtyard. Today, I am at ease. "It was by this stream that the master said – Thus do things flow away!" Sails move with the wind. Tortoise and Snake still. Great plans are afoot. Mao Zedong, 1956

Qu Yuan, his face carved into a bitter glare, stares down the gorge to the sparkling Yangtse. It is more than 2,000 years since the scholar and poet drowned himself, desolate after his expulsion from the court of the Kingdom of Chu, one of China’s ancient warring states.

Soon the waters will rise and claim Qu Yuan once more. A great plan is afoot. Downstream, the mountainous walls of the Three Gorges Dam are rising skywards and reaching out across the river they will block next year. Over the coming months, the temple and the surrounding towns and villages for hundreds of miles will be evacuated in preparation for the flood. The waters will climb almost 200 metres, creating a lake the length of England.

"In a way, we will be restructuring nature," says Dai Yin Fang, an engineer at the local environmental protection bureau. "The climate will change. The temperature around the dam will be affected. It will be cooler in summer and warmer in winter." Over time, she says, the ecosystem will return to balance, with the Yangtse tamed and an end to its vast floods.

It is an epic and controversial event in keeping with the upheavals that have shaped China since Qu Yuan’s days. The dam is both symbol and symptom of the energies unleashed by the country’s modernisation. Its waters will drown much history. But the Three Gorges project also reveals many of the currents of present-day China.

It is a story of surging economic power, barely restrained by popular concerns, and of another wrenching round of turmoil for many of its people. More than 1m are being forced to leave their homes and their histories by the project. Capitalist ambitions and communist hubris are now casting them adrift, just as the Yangtse’s flow has swept away former generations.

Since the days of Sun Yat Sen, the founder of modern China, successive regimes have sought to harness the river’s power. Dynasties would rise and fall with its floods and the fortunes they dictated for the communities along its banks.

Mao Zedong dreamt of damming the river – one of the few forces he could not control. Today’s leaders, headed by President Jiang Zemin and Li Peng, chairman of the National People’s Congress, have pushed the project near to completion, harking back to the mammoth ambitions of imperial rulers as they strive to unshackle the communist economy.

That economic drive has made the dam possible. The huge cost of RMB180bn ($22bn) can now be borne by the state and its deepening financial markets, along with funding from the foreign investors lured by China’s economic opening and its dynamic development over recent years.

The scale of the project – with tens of thousands of workers and brigades of diggers flattening hillsides and building new ones of concrete in their place – is a mark of China’s construction prowess and its commercial confidence.

It is the country’s largest engineering project since the Great Wall, and by some distance the world’s biggest dam. The 26 turbines beneath its walls will further power China’s rapid growth, providing cheap electricity to neighbouring provinces.

Dai at the Environment bureau is an enthusiast. Having devoted the "green spring of her youth" to the Communist party and having moved across the country from the pretty eastern town of Qingdao, she is now sighting victory in the campaign against the Yangtse’s hazards.

"Since the ancient times, this area had a reputation for treacherous rapids, whirlpools and unpredictable floods," she says. From the gorges to the mouth of the river in Shanghai, many millions of lives have been lost over the centuries.

Mao may be smiling in his mausoleum. But it is a project made possible only by the monopoly on power of his successors and the lack of democratic constraints they face. Big dams have fallen out of favour. From the Hoover Dam in Tennessee to the Aswan Dam of Nasser’s Egypt, they have long stood as symbols of human mastery over nature.

But environmental issues, corruption concerns and the impact on local populations have shifted opinion. Most recently, the Ilisu dam project in Turkey has drawn the wrath of environmental groups, threatening prospects for its construction.

Even in China, the unity of the party leadership has strained under the pressures surrounding the Three Gorges Dam. A decisive vote at the National People’s Congress in 1999 brought unprecedented opposition from almost one-third of the delegates. Since then, a flow of articles in China’s increasingly daring newspapers and magazines has kept discord bubbling.

Such criticism underlines spreading cracks in the monolith of the Chinese state. It also points to the breadth and depth of concerns surrounding the project. Many question whether it can provide the promised security from floods, with many of the Yangtse’s tributaries posing their own threats.

The dam will have a large and damaging environmental impact in one of China’s most beautiful areas. Countless antiques will be destroyed. The lake created could become a big cesspool, sullied by the waste of the heavy industries of nearby Chongqing and the sewage of neighbouring communities.

Corruption is a constant threat – to the dam’s physical structure as well as its financial underpinnings. Zhu Rongji, the reformist premier, has railed against so-called "tofu construction". In many projects, the risk from corruption is inefficiency and waste. Here, cutting corners would be a matter of life and watery death.

It is already a matter of life-changing dimensions for those displaced by the looming floods. Mass migrations and relocations are nothing new to China. Since the beginning of Communist rule in 1949, more than 10m people have been moved to make way for new dams and reservoir projects. Cities are being built to house the new wave of homeless, with shops, schools and new facilities. But there are doubts, fears and anger among their would-be residents.

Wang Yin is one of the new migrants. Her house, in the town of Zigui on the hill above the river, will be demolished the next day. "They are turning off the electricity tomorrow and are pulling down the house. I don’t know where we will go," she says. "My ancestors lived in this place. When it is flooded, who will care for their spirits?"

Behind her, above the pots of pickled potatoes and turnips, a dramatic poster of charging white stallions proclaims that the year of the horse will bring success.

"It hasn’t been lucky so far," she says, with stoic understatement. "Maybe things will get better."

Her dog, Spot, barks at the traffic and returns to lie by the empty bottles of rice wine that she sells.

Across the road – a thoroughfare for local business from the river but increasingly travelled by trucks carrying the possessions of an exodus – Tang Chen Ju can’t see things improving, even though it is difficult to see how they could be worse. She lost her job in a leather-shoe factory and her former house has been reduced to rubble. Her family now struggles to get by on the meagre takings her husband earns from washing cars outside the shack they have built in its stead.

"We are quite angry about our unfair treatment," she says. Her family was offered 100kwai ($12) in compensation for each of the 20 sq metres of their former apartment. She argues it should have been three times that because the building had a concrete structure. And while the government has assigned them a place in a new town, Tang says they cannot afford it.

In the old town, there is an air of unreality befitting a ghost town in the making. A couple dismantle the roof of their house, loading timbers and tiles on to a truck. Bold red characters mark the condemned buildings. Every 30 yards or so, a red line drawn on the red brick walls marks the level of the "second phase" of the dam, 135 metres above the present river. When phase three is complete, in 2009, the waters will rise a further 50 metres.

Signs of tension are apparent. "Anyone stealing money or interfering with money deliveries will be executed on the spot," reads a notice outside the local credit co-operative.

For now at least, business continues to bustle on the main, twisting street. Market traders have even taken over the government buildings evacuated ahead of the flood. But anxieties are apparent in brief conversation.

A middle-aged woman selling Sorghum wine from large clay vats will move to "new Zigui" a few hills away. But she fears business will be worse. A fertiliser seller down the road has similar concerns. "We have lots of farmers around here who need fertiliser for their orange trees."

Standing alongside a red line on the wall, depicting where the waters will reach, Cha sells tobacco and vents his frustration. "Not only are we not being compensated. On the contrary, we are compensating them by paying a lot of taxes before we leave."

Some of the more disgruntled have petitioned the local authorities, travelling to regional government offices to protest. It is a sign of a growing willingness to challenge official decisions.

But the protesters have found little response. "What can you do? We can do nothing," says Wang. "The country wants to develop and the country can do nothing about us. They have borrowed lots of foreign debt and they don’t have anything left over to give to people like me."

Far down below, a grimy Soviet-era ferry crests the glinting Yangtse as it heads towards the quay. The bend it turns is known locally as "ghost gate pass" – a reference to its perils and the lives it has claimed, but now a reminder of the deluge soon to come. For like the flotsam in the ferry’s wake, the residents of Zigui and many other towns along the river are adrift, uncertain of their fates amid the latest swell of China’s tides.