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Analysis
In the run-up to the blocking of the Three Gorges dam diversion channel earlier this month, the Chinese press was inundated with positive stories about the concrete great wall being built across the Yangtze. The propaganda campaign was timed to coincide with the 16th congress of the Communist Party, when modern China’s third generation of leaders was due to step down.

 

To mark their departure and memorialize their achievements, these leaders (including dam proponent Li Peng) needed an enduring monument by which to be remembered. China’s first emperor, Qinshi Huangdi, built the Great Wall; Sui Yangdi constructed the Grand Canal; Mao Zedong built Sanmenxia dam in the north and Gezhouba dam in the south. The leaders who are now retiring leave a concrete legacy in the form of the world’s biggest dam, which project authorities claim will operate for thousands of years and withstand even a nuclear attack.

But amid all the rosy reports hailing the dam’s many purported benefits, another series of stories took a different tack. These emphasized the enormous challenges the dam builders faced on Nov. 6 in finally blocking the canal that had been created five years ago for ships to use while the dam was being constructed across the main stream of the Yangtze. Press reports referred to the blocking of the diversion channel as "extremely difficult," "an unprecedented challenge," and "unimaginably tough." The day after this challenge was successfully met, Li Yongan, vice-manager general of the Three Gorges Corp., told Hong Kong’s Wenwei Pao newspaper that the impending third phase of the dam project "will be much tougher" than earlier stages.

Project officials have been underscoring the arduousness of their task for almost a decade now. Why have they sought to place so much emphasis on the difficulties they face? In my opinion, they have three reasons for doing so. First, officials seek to secure their political future, engineers to further their professional career, and ordinary workers to ensure their job security. Naturally, they all want to claim credit for their work on the dam, and the "tougher" the task, the more glorious their achievements will appear. Second, officials can use the "unprecedented challenge" they face as a bargaining point when asking the central government for more funding. And third, declaring that their task is becoming ever tougher will help shield them from blame should things go terribly wrong with the dam in the future: Surely some human error is inevitable with such a formidably difficult project.

Li Yongan, meanwhile, raised three problems that officials really do face in this new phase of the project: designing and manufacturing the giant shiplift that was originally planned for the dam; resettling more than a million people; and building a series of wastewater treatment plants in time to protect water quality in the reservoir after it begins forming behind the dam next June.

While Chinese reporters with no basic knowledge of engineering can blithely claim that navigation on the Yangtze will improve once the dam is built, project officials are well aware of the difficulties of designing and producing the world’s biggest shiplift. Belgian engineers refused to get involved with that huge and complex structure; German companies also walked away from it. Now it is unclear whether the shiplift will ever go ahead. Project officials have more grounds for confidence in the operation of the five-step shiplock – but even that structure is merely an effort to ameliorate the fact that the Three Gorges dam is a barrier to navigation that boats must now somehow get around.

Resettlement, too, remains a major challenge for project officials. About 640,000 people – perhaps half the number who must be moved to make way for the dam – have been relocated so far. This has been achieved by employing a variety of methods, including coercion (for instance, demolishing houses or cutting off power and water supplies to force people out of their homes), and there is still a long way to go. Furthermore, nobody can guarantee that the migrants will be happy with their new conditions, or will resign themselves to the decline in income and standard of living that many of them have suffered.

The very day after the diversion channel was sealed off, China’s official media began celebrating the fact that "water quality in the Three Gorges is the same as before the blocking." But of course it is, for the reservoir has not yet been filled, and it is far too early to jump to such optimistic conclusions. The water quality in the future reservoir will depend on many variables, including whether the bottom of the reservoir can be cleaned up in time; whether the wastewater-treatment plants can be built in time (and then operated properly); and whether the "white pollution" caused by Styrofoam and other plastic debris floating on the river can be controlled.

Mu Lan is editor of the Chinese edition of Three Gorges Probe.