(July 19, 2000) Shanghai: The China Three Gorges Project Corporation (CTGPC) is keen to emphasize the virtues of its flagship hydropower dam on the middle reaches of the Yangtze River. The state-owned company recently launched a propaganda campaign entitled “Three Gorges Project: The Harmonious Development Humanity and Nature”, a photography exhibition which will demonstrate how the project “harnesses and develops the Yangtze” and explore the “successes [the project has contributed] to China’s hydropower development and the protection of its environment”. … CTGPC has been given the go-ahead to build two massive new hydropower plants at Xiluodu and Xiangjiaba, both on the Jinsha River, the Yangtze’s western branch. The two projects, with a combined generation capacity that will exceed the Three Gorges facility, are being constructed partly in order to alleviate the silt pressures flowing in from upstream. “Building more dams to relieve silt build-ups only transfers the problem upstream,” said Patricia Adams, the executive director of Probe International, a Toronto-based pressure group, in a telephone interview with Interfax. … The Chinese government, with their battalions of environmentalists, geologists, meteorologists, archeologists and hydrologists, insist that they have done everything in their power to minimize the problems that might transpire from the world’s biggest water project, but Patricia Adams told Interfax that the efforts were far from sufficient. She said that the Chinese government have “ignored the real costs of the Three Gorges in order to justify a bad decision”. … “[The Dam] is a huge risk introduced into the river valley,” Adams said, “threatening not only those communities that live within the flood zone around the reservoir, but the millions of people downstream from the dam itself that is at risk of overtopping, perhaps structural damage and, god forbid, catastrophic failure.” … The government have justified the hydropower boom as a vital fuel for economic growth in some of China’s more impoverished regions. “The need for economic growth is a legitimate and noble question, but the real question is whether or not hydro dams deliver it, and the answer is no,” said Adams. “The local people get all the costs and none of the benefits,” she said. … Read the full story.

David Stanway, Interfax, July 19, 2000