Kelly Haggart and Mu Lan

November 7, 2003

Celebrated water engineer Zhang Guangdou has for the first time publicly called for the disastrous Sanmenxia dam on the Yellow River, which he helped design in the 1950s, to be shut down.

The project has been plagued since its completion in 1960 by the rapid accumulation of sediment in its reservoir, a worry that also surrounds the Three Gorges dam. (The seriousness of that concern was apparent in a report last week in The Times of London: “Engineers have given warning that a silt build-up could cripple the [Three Gorges] turbines, allegedly leading Siemens, one of the main suppliers, to turn down the offer from Beijing of a contract for maintenance work that would make it responsible for running the turbines.”)

Prof. Zhang, now in his early 90s, described Sanmenxia as “a mistake” that had brought severe flooding and much suffering this summer to five million people living along the Wei River, a major tributary of the Yellow River 100 kilometres upstream of the big dam.

During an interview broadcast Oct. 31 on the China Central Television program Economic Half-Hour, Prof. Zhang said that former water resources minister Qian Zhengying shared his regret that Sanmenxia had ever been built.

The CCTV reporter noted that Prof. Zhang had chosen not to include pictures of Sanmenxia among the photos hanging in his study that show the many large dams he helped design over the years, while images of Danjiangkou, Xiaolangdi, Gezhouba, Three Gorges and other projects are proudly displayed.

The area along the Wei River upstream of Sanmenxia in Shaanxi province sustained such severe flood damage this year that local people are hoping for a mild winter because they lost so many warm clothes and other belongings in the disasters, the CCTV reporter said.

While many experts now believe that dismantling Sanmenxia would be the best solution, others continue to defend the project because of the jobs and income it provides. “Sanmenxia is too important to abandon. The survival of our enterprise depends on it,” Wang Yujie, an official with the Sanmenxia Management Bureau, told CCTV.

Suo Lisheng, deputy water-resources minister, suggested it might be possible to ameliorate the situation by adjusting the Sanmenxia operating regime. For instance, lowering the water level by two metres at Tonggua city, located at the confluence of the Wei and Yellow rivers, could help reduce the flood threat to the area’s residents, Mr. Suo was quoted as saying.

But Prof. Zhang insisted that power generation at Sanmenxia and water storage in its reservoir should simply be halted, and maintained that he had opposed the project from the outset.

“I warned that building the dam would cause sedimentation in Shaanxi province,” he said. However, he blamed the political climate at the time (the Sanmenxia debate coincided with Mao’s anti-rightist campaign) and the fact that the Soviet experts brought in to advise on the project “were so powerful that we could do nothing to stop it.”

Prof. Zhang made no mention in the interview of Huang Wanli, a fellow water engineer who became his colleague at Beijing’s prestigious Qinghua University, and who died two years ago at age 90.

At a meeting called in June 1957 to discuss the project, Mr. Huang was alone among more than 70 experts in arguing that the Sanmenxia dam should not be built. But if the project did go ahead, he argued, silt-discharging tubes and sluice gates should be built so sediment carried by the notoriously muddy Yellow River could be flushed out of the reservoir.

Although the design for the 340-metre-high dam that was subsequently approved by the State Council included the outlets advocated by Mr. Huang, his advice was ignored during the construction phase, with tragic consequences. In an account of the debacle in The River Dragon Has Come!, writer Shang Wei says that “under the leadership of Professor Zhang Guangdou, and based on suggestions from the Soviet experts, the 12 tubes specified by the initial design were blocked by reinforced concrete during construction. By 1967, each and every one had to be reopened at a cost of 10 million yuan each.”

After he argued that the dam was destined to fail, Mr. Huang was labelled a rightist. By the time he was sent to do hard labour near Sanmenxia during the Cultural Revolution, his predictions about the dam had come true: So much sediment had built up in the reservoir that adjacent farmland was waterlogged, and the dam was useless and had to be rebuilt at enormous cost.

Wen Shanzhang, now retired from the Yellow River Water Resources Commission in Zhengzhou, Henan province, told CCTV that he too had paid a high price for opposing the dam. “I held fast to my opinions and never gave up, but I suffered a great deal as a result.”

Mr. Wen suggested that to avoid repeating similar mistakes in the future, mechanisms should be created to allow a range of views, including dissident opinions, to be voiced and heeded.

While he did not mention the Three Gorges dam by name, that scheme also lacks mechanisms that would allow dissident scientific viewpoints to be heard – those warning, for instance, about the buildup of sediment in the reservoir of the world’s biggest dam.