1. Speech delivered by Pan Jiazheng, member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and former vice-director of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, at the Department of Water Conservancy and Hydropower, Qinghua University, Beijing, and reprinted in Guangming Daily (Guangming Ribao) on Feb. 21, 2003:

The interaction between humans and water has a long history, which can be divided into three stages. In the first stage, people were incapable of doing anything at all to help themselves. In the second stage, they had a limited ability to fight nature: All they could do was escape or die in the face of devastating floods and natural disasters.

With economic development and advances in science and technology, humans have entered a new stage in which they are able to control water and to use it, by building dams and reservoirs, canals and channels, and hydropower stations. Humans can now reap benefits that include flood control, irrigation, water supply, navigation and hydropower generation.

It’s fair to say that we have made great strides. But at the same time, unfortunately, we have made a number of mistakes. In some cases, we paid a high price for our mistakes, some of which were irreversible and impossible to remedy. Nature took its revenge on our human errors.

We are in the third stage now. It’s time for us to draw lessons from our experiences in order to live in harmony with nature. It’s particularly important for us to take a scientific and sustainable approach to the management of water resources. In building water projects, we aim to promote benefits and eliminate harm, but it seems that we have not done very well at that. Moreover, it has become a tradition that in almost every feasibility study prepared in advance of a water project, we focus on the positive aspects, listing every single detail of those in a comprehensive and exhaustive way.

However, we have never treated the negative consequences in the same way. It appears that we lack the confidence to deal with the impacts, especially the adverse ones that occur after a project’s completion. But in the absence of effective and thorough solutions to the problems, water-conservancy projects can turn into water disasters – and we engineers in charge of the projects will be condemned by history as the guilty parties.

Allow me to make a suggestion: Why don’t we create the new category of “water calamities,” meaning water disasters caused by human activities. I think we have to have a good understanding of the problems before we can address them. I would argue that we must adopt several guiding principles in assessing a water project:

1. Take a dynamic rather than static approach to a project’s costs and benefits. For example, some projects can bring short-term benefits, but in the long term the disadvantages can greatly outweigh the advantages.

2. Take the river basin as a whole into account when assessing a project, rather than just a single tributary or the reaches of a river. The ecosystem of a river valley is a single entity, and so we cannot just focus on the upper reaches and ignore the downstream sections; nor can we just concentrate on the river itself and ignore both banks of the river. It’s true that a trans-basin water project [such as the south-north water diversion scheme] would be much more complex, involving many factors and covering a large area.

3. Take an overall rather than partial approach when assessing a project. While building a reservoir may achieve the goal of regulating the runoff of a river, [the benefits of] natural floods would also disappear. It is also true that utilizing water resources can benefit people but harm the environment. For example, building the Three Gorges dam will bring flood-control benefits, but it is also likely to give rise to new and unexpected problems, such as deepening of the riverbed below the dam caused by “scouring” [erosion] and possible alterations in the river regime. Therefore, it is crucial for us to realize that we should not construct projects that bring only short-term benefits, while harming people and the environment in the long term.

2. Remarks by Pan Jiazheng at a meeting of the Three Gorges project inspection team held at the dam site before the blocking of the diversion channel in early November. Published on the Web site of the Changjiang Water Resources Commission, Nov. 1, 2002:

The inspection work [on the Three Gorges project] is not just a technical task but, importantly, a serious political one. Three Gorges is a grand project that can benefit future generations for thousands of years. With great enthusiasm and respect, our friends all over the world are looking forward to its success, while our enemies, those who are against China, are anticipating its failure. So we have to take the job seriously and do a thorough, scientific and accurate assessment of the tasks of the project’s second phase [1998-2003].

Let me remind you all that the real examiners are not the expert team or the inspection group, but the water pressure after 39 billion cubic metres of water are impounded in the reservoir; the devastating floods that occur almost every year; the earthquakes and landslides; the boats travelling on the river; and the turbines generating electricity. These are the real examiners, who will show no mercy. They are ready to take their revenge and exploit any mistakes and misjudgments that we make in design, construction, manufacturing and installation, as well as project management.

3. Pan Jiazheng discussing the south-north water diversion project at a conference on management of the Yangtze River valley held in Wuhan, Hubei province, in January. Published on the Web site of the Changjiang Water Resources Commission, Jan. 9, 2003:

Trans-basin water-transfer projects are particularly complicated. Globally, there have been few successful attempts, but many negative examples. So we must be very careful about the south-north water diversion project. In my opinion, we have to take critical views seriously and even take some of the reasonable proposals and suggestions into account.

We also should undertake an intensive study of the potential negative impacts of the water-transfer project, so that we are able to mitigate and minimize the harmful effects. However, the problems that emerge should not be seen as a reason to abandon the project altogether, because people in north China have been expecting this water for decades and the feasibility studies also go back decades.

Translation by Three Gorges Probe (Chinese) editor Mu Lan