Cox News Service
September 10, 2006

‘Under Mao, scientists were often sidelined, but now the government has realized that it needs technical expertise to solve its problems,’ said Zhao Yean, a senior member of the Yellow River Conservancy Commission.

Beijing: The plan sounds audacious: Move 53 trillion gallons of water – roughly equivalent to 40 percent of Lake Erie – annually from Tibet to northern China to turn deserts and parched lands into fields and forests. The ambitious proposal to build hundreds of miles of aqueducts, tunnels and reservoirs, called the Big Western Line, is reminiscent of massive engineering projects carried out with little environmental oversight under Mao Zedong in the 1950s and 1960s. But unlike in the Mao era, the proposal has drawn a chorus of protest from China’s scientific community and created a rare rift between the experts and some of the Communist Party’s most prominent statesmen. The discord has prevented the project from getting beyond the drawing board, and it highlights the more prominent role China’s scientists have achieved in recent decades. “Under Mao, scientists were often sidelined, but now the government has realized that it needs technical expertise to solve its problems,” said Zhao Yean, a senior member of the government’s Yellow River Water Resources Committee