March 11, 2008

FT correspondent Jamil Anderlini describes the 1960s-era Sanmenxia dam on the Yellow River as a disastrous precedent for the much larger Three Gorges project, which is nearing completion this year. A former communist party boss in Shaanxi province, the region most directly affected by Sanmenxia, is quoted saying the dam was “really a stupid mistake” that has brought “severe disasters to the people living near the river.”

An Qingyuan has campaigned for years to have the dam demolished, FT reports, after rapid sediment buildup in the dam’s reservoir made flooding upstream far worse than before the dam. More than 400,000 people were forcibly evicted to make way for the dam in the 1960s but by the mid-1980s the government started moving farmers back, allocating them just a fraction of the land they had lost more than two decades before.

Like the Three Gorges dam, Sanmenxia was originally designed to control flooding, produce electricity, and improve transport on the Yellow River. Today Sanmenxia generates power “only sporadically and in tiny quantities” prompting many to question whether Three Gorges can live up to proponents’ claims, FT reports.

Wu Xinmu, a professor at Wuhan University and a leading expert on China’s water resources management, is quoted saying, “The world has entered a post-dam period and the Sanmenxia dam was clearly a mistake. We should learn from the lesson of Sanmenxia and consider the long-term influence of dams rather than the short-term benefits.”