Thank you so much. It is a real honour and pleasure to be able to discuss the issue of harnessing the law to protect people and their environments in China. It is an issue dear to my heart.

Years ago, a colleague at the International Rivers Network in California nicknamed me Pat “there ought to be a law” Adams because, as we tried to stop the World Bank from building environmentally and economically destructive hydro dams, I always lamented that there ought to be laws against creating harm with impunity. Well, there ought to be laws and there is perhaps no case more egregious than the Three Gorges dam on China’s Yangtze River. I’m going to explain how the absence of justice, stretching from Canada to China, allowed the Three Gorges dam to proceed.

You may wonder why an environmental group from Canada has been so dedicated in following the Three Gorges dam. Well, it all started in 1986, when the Canadian government proudly announced that the Chinese government had chosen it to pay for the “official feasibility study” for the Three Gorges dam.Our foreign aid Minister announced what a great day it was for Canadian companies which would be in a better position to get contracts to build the dam.Herein lies the first incidence of the absence of justice that helped breathe life into the Three Gorges dam:proponents should never evaluate their own projects.They have a conflict of interest.

Now, we knew that Chinese citizens probably wouldn’t have a chance to challenge the Chinese government on the plan to build the dam, so we decided we better do it.

We managed to get a copy of the feasibility study using the Canadian Access to Information Act:and we weren’t surprised that the study concluded that the dam was feasible, safe, and beneficial and should be built at an early date.

We immediately contacted a number of experts from around the world, including an American hydrologist and civil engineer, two economists, and several aquatic and environmental experts.We asked them to review the Three Gorges feasibility study from their area of expertise.

What they found was worse than we expected: the study was so rife with errors, omissions, and bias that we filed complaints against the engineering firms (that conducted the study ) with their regulatory bodies arguing that they were guilty of negligence, incompetence, and misconduct.But our complaints that they had violated their code of professional conduct to protect life and property failed on the grounds that the engineers were just following “generally accepted international engineering standards.” We failed to hold proponents of risky and damaging projects liable for their actions.Herein lies the second incidence of the absence of justice.

Well, we were defeated but not down.We had published our critique in a book called Damming the Three Gorges: What Dam Builders Don’t Want You to Know.

Meanwhile, in early 1989, just as we were preparing our critique, we heard of an extraordinary event in China:there, a group of journalists had managed to publish a book of critical opinions about the Three Gorges dam from China’s most eminent experts.They held a press conference to release it and then distributed it to delegates in the National People’s Congress, leading to the decision by the State Council to postpone the dam for five years.In their press conference, the journalists and contributors said “for the first time ordinary Chinese people will not keep silent on a weighty economic policy decision. They don’t want to see an endless repetition of foolish policies.”

We were elated.We were doing cartwheels.The chief editor of this book, Yangtze! Yangtze!, was Dai Qing.The first print run of 5,000 ran out in no time, so a second run of 50,000 copies was printed up and flew off the shelves.By then it was the spring of 1989 and the extraordinary publication of Yangtze! Yangtze! was swept up into the euphoria of the democracy movement and the student demonstrations in Tiananmen Square.

And then June 4 came and soon after Dai Qing was jailed for having contributed to the turmoil with the publication of Yangtze! Yangtze!. The book was banned, and remaining copies were “pulped.” After her release from prison, 10 months later, Dai Qing could no longer work as a celebrated Guangming Daily journalist and remains banned from publishing to this day.

Absence of justice number #3: journalists and scholars, who wanted nothing more than the free exchange of information and a public debate on an important public policy were jailed without trial, demoted, otherwise intimidated and silenced.Books were pulped.

Within two years, approval of the Three Gorges dam was rammed through the National People’s Congress, despite attempts by members to get details of the dam and have a debate.Their microphones are turned off, the vote was called and, for the first time since 1949, one-third of the delegates vote no or abstain from approving the Three Gorges dam. Absence of justice #4: lawmakers are denied information and the right to conduct an informed debate on their lawmaking.

Since 1992, when the Three Gorges dam was approved by that tumultuous National People’s Congress, and construction began, we have worked tirelessly with Dai Qing and other brave journalists, scholars, and ordinary citizens who are being affected by the dam to bring the truth about Three Gorges to mainland Chinese readers and to foreigners with the translation and publication of Yangtze! Yangtze!, a second book from Dai Qing called The River Dragon Has Come!, and an online Chinese and English news service called Three Gorges Probe.

Our goal has been to circumvent the long-standing ban of criticism about the Three Gorges dam and to hold the mirror up to its proponents: here is what you promised the dam would do, here is the reality.

And the reality is not good:

• the 600-kilometre long reservoir has triggered life-threatening landslides and tsunami-like waves up to 50 metres high causing the river banks to collapse in more than 90 places and 70,000 people to be evacuated;

• rapid sediment buildup in Chongqing harbour at the upper end of the Three Gorges reservoir, will render the port useless within 20 years or sooner;

• water released from the dam is scouring flood control embankments at an alarming rate, putting downstream Wuhan at great risk;

• the dam has created a navigation nightmare – a bottleneck – around which goods are now transported by road;

• the power produced by the dam is both costly and less reliable due to the vagaries of the river flow and conflicting flood storage objectives;

• hundreds of thousands of farmers have been moved uphill onto steep and barren hillsides with few alternative means of income;

• in all, 1.2 million people have been moved, at least once. When the project is completed, as many as 2 million will have been displaced one way or another by the Three Gorges dam.

The enormity of these costs and risks – all due to the absence of financial, political and legal accountability of dam authorities – is almost too large to grasp. The case of Mr. Lu Chengming, isn’t however.

Mr. Lu was the owner of a small hotel and wharf that are now swallowed up by the Three Gorges reservoir.He wasn’t rich, but a low-level party official and later a worker who, together with his wife, scrimped and saved enough money to build ahotel in which he and his family lived and operated in Great Prosperity Town at the junction where the Daning River meets the Yangtze.It wasn’t a large hotel, but it was a well-loved one by travelers and the townsfolk:it could accommodate 30 people, and provided a restaurant and a small gift shop in which he sold lovely stones from the Yangtze River. The safety of the pre-existing wharf and steep steps to it from the hotel worried Mr. Lu and his wife.When an elderly lady slipped and fell into the river – luckily Mr. Lu rescued her – he and his wife, who by then had managed to save more, resolved to invest $2,500 and their labour to make the wharf and steps safe.Their investment was greeted with admiration and appreciation by all in the town and recognized in local newspaper reports.

Then came the Yangtze Water Resources Commission surveyors to assess who should be compensated, for what, and how much:they undervalued the square footage of his property by half and ignored his claim to the steps and wharf entirely.When Mr. Lu protested to various levels of authority, first they ignored him, then they slandered him, then they beat him, then they tricked him into signing a document – Mr. Lu is semi-literate – in which he accepted blame for his own beating, then they bulldozed his hotel, dismantled his wharf andburned his household possessions.Since then, Mr. Lu and his children and grandchildren who, once lived in and earned a living from the Orient Hotel, have moved 12 times from outdoor shelters to warehouses, to a tiny apartment, and finally to different cities across the country in search of work or welfare assistance.

By my count, these abuses heaped on Mr. Lu and his family bring the incidences of the absence of justice caused by the Three Gorges dam up to 11.

Through it all, Mr. Lu has clung to the few legal tools available to him – urging the authorities to “examine the documents” proving his claim, citing regulations governing demolition of houses, compensation for property, and resettlement of people, submitting surveys, ordinances for compensation and evidence of his claim to various official bodies including the Chongqing Resettlement Bureau, the Municipal Government, the Three Gorges Construction Project Committee, the State Council, and the National People’s Congress, all to no avail.

Despite these state-inflicted abuses, Mr. Lu remains a law-abiding citizen:“I support the necessary demolition and relocations so that our country can build the dam,” he says, “but it has to be done equitably and lawfully. Of course I want to fight to obtain the compensation I am entitled to!I’ll definitely fight for justice under the law!,” he adds.

Mr. Lu’s story is but one of many, many stories of people in the path of the Three Gorges dam who have been similarly impoverished and abused for attempting to defend themselves, their families and their communities.Dai Qing and Probe International are now collecting and publishing their stories as Oral Histories.I urge you to read them in full because they illustrate the crushing effect of the unrestrained use of the power of eminent domain and assaultto silence those who demand justice. These oral histories show the full effect of the absence of a functioning judicial system to hold government to its espoused laws, to treat all citizens as equal before the law, and to deliver natural justice.

One wants to weep for Mr. Lu when you read his story.But one wants to weep for China too because you see how the absence of justice destroys the best of the human spirit that could otherwise be harnessed to improve the lives of all Chinese citizens.

The Three Gorges dam, I argue, can only be built in the absence of justice.Because if Chinese citizens had the laws to protect themselves and the ability to exercise their rights in a fully functioning judicial system, the Three Gorges dam would have quickly been proven to be too risky and too expensive.And alternatives, of which there are many, would have risen to their rightful place in China’s future.

One word of caution.Many people place much stock in the power of environmental assessment laws to stop disasters and China has a newly minted one. Iagree that China’s new EIA law is a monumental step forward in that it recognizes the right of citizens to comment on environmentally damaging projects and is helping to put government plans in the public spotlight.

But the environmental assessment law won’t deliver justice to Chinese citizens threatened by developers and it won’t save China’s environment.Probe International has for two decades been reviewing environmental assessments, starting with the one that was part of the Canadian feasibility study for the Three Gorges dam.It was a sham.

It is important to remember that environmental assessments are usually conducted and controlled by the proponents.And as long as the proponents cannot be held accountable or liable to those they harm or put at risk, they can discount or even ignore the costs they inflict on others, like those inflicted on Mr. Lu.We economists call it “externalizing the costs.”Environmental assessments, and indeed feasibility studies, have become notorious for routinely overestimating benefits and underestimating costs.In the end, they become little more than public relations exercises to whitewash bad projects.