(October 13, 2007) Often cited as China’s foremost investigative journalist, the woman who for almost 20 years has championed opposition to the massive Three Gorges dam is about to arrive in Australia to complete what she muses may be her life’s work.

Dai Qing, 66, is due to take up a one-year fellowship at the Australian National University to finish what she says is her most important and perhaps final book – about the relationship between dictatorships and liberal intellectuals.

The exuberant, irrepressible Dai has lived that relationship daily, battling China’s communist authorities since the 1970s, despite her privileged upbringing as the daughter of a revolutionary martyr.

Dai was born into an elite family of intellectuals in 1941. Her parents were spies for the communists during the Japanese occupation of Beijing. When she was four her father, Fu Daqing, was arrested and killed by the Japanese. Her father’s close friend Marshal Ye Jianying, one of China’s revered Ten Generals who won the revolution for Mao Zedong in 1949, adopted her. Although she was forced to leave behind her mother, brother and sister to live with Marshal Ye’s family, it was considered a great honour and opportunity for her.

As the adopted daughter of one of the most powerful men in China, she led a privileged life after the founding of the People’s Republic of China. Because China was so impoverished after decades of war and banditry, the gap between the elite and the poor was much narrower than it is today. Rather than material wealth, growing up in the top echelon of the Communist Party leadership instilled in Dai a sense of entitlement to speak her mind. She was later to learn this was not everyone’s birthright.

Dai could have used her impeccable connections to gain power and prestige – like thousands of children of communist leaders who have enriched themselves since China began opening to the world after 1979. Instead, the trained missile engineer and loyal communist cadre ended up abandoning the party for a life as a crusading journalist, writer, historian and activist with little power or prestige, but a lasting effect on modern Chinese society.

She founded what was one of China’s first environmental lobby groups, setting a trend that today has resulted in the formation of thousands of grass-roots environmental and other pressure groups despite Government disapproval and sometimes active repression. After almost 20 years of Dai’s campaign against the Three Gorges Dam, which she considers a monstrous waste of money and an environmental and social disaster, official attitudes towards the project seem to have finally turned.

Harnessing China’s mightiest river has been a dream of China’s leaders since early last century, first supported by the republic’s founder Sun Yat Sen and then a succession of communist leaders after 1949, including Mao. But in a frank admission recently, Government officials who had once championed the $US27 billion-plus ($A30 billion-plus) dam as a symbol of China’s economic and technological prowess, crucial to control deadly floods on the Yangtze and satisfy the nation’s demand for power, admitted that the environmental problems they had repeatedly denied or played down were real and possibly catastrophic.

Officials revealed that the shore of the reservoir had collapsed in 91 places, with waves as high as 50 metres causing havoc along a total of 36 kilometres of shore, with dozens of deaths. The report was distributed by Xinhua newsagency, the Government’s official mouthpiece.

When Dai learnt of the about-face, she felt a vindication of sorts, but she has no illusions that it signals dramatic changes. Noting the conspicuous absence of senior leaders, including President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao from ceremonies marking the completion of the dam’s main wall last year, she suspects the Xinhua report is part of the current Government’s machinations to distance itself from blame.

“The Government knows it has made a mistake. Now they are afraid that the catastrophe that they cannot prevent will spark civil unrest. So they want to go public before the troubles start,” she said soon after the Xinhua report came out.

DAI’S first stirrings of disillusionment with China’s communist regime came in her late 20s, when she was sent to labour in the countryside on a pig farm during the Cultural Revolution. From 1969 to 1971 she and her husband were separated from their baby daughter for almost three years and repeatedly denied leave to visit her. Dai’s mother, tortured by the Japanese during the war, was again tortured, this time by Mao’s Red Guards for surviving the Japanese interrogation.

After the Cultural Revolution Dai was reunited in Beijing with her husband and daughter. She learnt English so she could translate children’s books for her daughter and began writing fiction while continuing to serve the state as a weapons expert and later part-time spy. She was recruited for the intelligence job after her first short story – about a husband and wife separated during the violent ideological upheaval of Mao’s Cultural Revolution – was published in 1979 to acclaim. She was sent to Paris posing as a member of the Chinese Writers Association in 1981 to befriend American writers at a literary conference.

She was, she says, a lousy spy, but by now saw herself as a writer. In 1982 she joined the staff of the Guangming Daily (Enlightenment Daily). Over the next seven years, as a reporter and weekly columnist, she wrote critically about China’s role in the Sino-Vietnamese war and began profiling prominent dissidents such as astrophysicist Fang Lizhi, who was later to gain asylum in the US after supporting the Tiananmen Square protests.

It was on a trip in 1988 to Hong Kong, then a British colony, that Dai first learnt of disquiet about the feasibility of the Three Gorges scheme. The next year, fired up by her Hong Kong trip, she edited and eventually got published Yangtze! Yangtze, a collection of essays from experts and officials voicing concern about the project. It was the first overt attempt to harness public opinion to influence a Communist Party decision. At the same time, student demonstrations calling for greater political reforms were gathering strength around the country, culminating in the June 4 Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing. Dai was jailed without charge for 10 months, even though she had opposed the students at the end and sought to persuade them to disband, fearing a bloodbath.

After her release from jail Dai continued to campaign against the dam, travelling around the world to lobby governments and institutions such as the World Bank not to fund the project. She refused offers of asylum abroad.

In 1991 she made international headlines when she was kidnapped by security police for four days to prevent her meeting the visiting then US secretary of state, James Baker, in Beijing.

Even though Yangtze! Yangtze! was banned after June 4, the Government issued a moratorium on the dam. In 1992 when China’s parliament, the National People’s Congress, finally reconvened, then premier Li Peng managed to revive the project but an astonishing third of the normally acquiescent delegates voted against the dam or abstained. It was the first such open dissent that had occurred in the Great Hall of the People.

Patricia Adams, executive director of Canadian environmental think-tank Probe International, which has worked frequently with Dai, says her contribution was pivotal and brave. “She has chosen to defend freedom of the press and the right of Chinese citizens to know and to participate in this monumental decision at great risk to herself. Without her, crucial public information about the project would have been handicapped, to the extraordinary loss of the Chinese people,” Adams says.

Despite Dai’s spying on the US, Washington became one of her strongest backers, forcing the Chinese authorities to give her permission to leave China to take up a prestigious Neimen Fellowship for Journalists from Harvard after June 4. Her status also meant that after she finished the fellowship, China was forced to allow her to return, unlike less fortunate and well-connected dissidents who had found themselves barred. Since then she has earned a living publishing abroad, consulting and translating under a pseudonym (she is in the midst of a fight with the publisher she works for to have her translations credited in her own name).

Today, she lives in a small apartment, part of a giant, leafy housing estate in Beijing’s far outer suburbs that is modelled on an American gated community for rich retirees. She lives with her husband, mother and now adult daughter in a flat bought with the help of her brother, who lives in the US. She readily acknowledges that she has had a privileged life – even when she was jailed after Tiananmen Square, she was always treated humanely, she says in her 2004 prison memoir, Tiananmen Follies, but it has not been without cost.

Despite her readiness to poke fun at herself and the authorities, the ban on her publishing in China was a blow that, even18 years later, still angers her. It was, she says, a painful severing from the readership that matters most to her, her mainland compatriots.

This year Dai has discovered blogging and is excited and emotional about this limited reunion with her readers. “Sometimes I am still very, very angry, but it’s no use. The blog is one way I can try to get in touch with my readers.”

One of the first messages she posted was a poignant, “Dear Readers, I think of you often, it has been so long,” Even now, the rules are that she cannot post any of her post-1989 work on the blog. She initially complied but eventually posted two recent articles, both published overseas and about Tiananmen Square, that she felt particularly strongly about.

She was in Canberra last month – giving the 68th George E. Morrison Lecture at the Australian National University, about the peaceful liberation of Beijing by her adopted father Marshal Ye – when the internet police removed them, posting a message on her blog politely advising her that they had done so.

Asked about the prognosis for China, she describes herself as an “active pessimist”. “I don’t think the future is so bright, but every minute, every small thing I try to do my best to correct it, improve it, let people know the truth.”

Speaking the truth as she finds it has meant she has also been criticised by the left. She has been called a communist apologist for accusing the student democracy leaders of Tiananmen Square of being ego-driven extremists who forced an avoidable confrontation with the authorities. This, she argues, allowed party hardliners to purge moderates such as then party chief Zhao Ziyang, thus squandering an opportunity to improve freedoms. It is a position she stands by today. Even now she does not think China is ready for democracy – its civil society is too weak, she says, backing instead gradual reform.

She feels fortunate, though, that she lives in this time. “If it were the ’50s and ’60s, a person like me would have suffered a lot, 20-30 years totally wasted, maybe even dead and no one knows about you. Today it is different. Though it is not good enough, it is different.”

Despite her protestations that she just wants to “be a happy retiree”, she is busily working on several other projects, which she is not yet ready to discuss but hints will be controversial. She has also continued mentoring and training younger researchers and activists.

As far as the Three Gorges project goes, the 18 gigawatts of electricity the dam will generate by the time it is fully operational in 2009 will not go far to meet China’s extraordinary power needs. When the dam was formally commissioned in 1992, it was expected to provide about a 10th of the nation’s power needs. Today China’s voracious appetite for electricity means the dam will be able to supply about 3 per cent of the country’s growing needs.

Mary-Anne Toy is China correspondent.

Press, Mary-Anne Toy, The age, October 13, 2007