(September 10, 2002) ‘Experts like Chen Guojie of the China Academy of Sciences have expressed their concern about the “rampant” overdevelopment of the rivers in China’s southwestern regions.’

Dujiangyan, Sichuan: Despite the unprecedented size of some of China’s recent engineering projects, China’s attempts to tame nature are not a recent phenomenon. About fifty kilometers north of Chengdu, the provincial capital of Sichuan Province, stands the celebrated irrigation project of Dujiangyan, built more than two thousand years ago to prevent floods and divert the overspill from the fierce Min River, a long tributary of the Yangtze. Centuries later, Sichuan is still trying to harness the power of the Min, this time to generate the electricity required to fuel local development, and the province’s other rivers have also been targeted.

Power company representatives have been flooding into the whole of southwestern China in what has been described as a “free-for-all” on China’s rivers, and opponents are worried not merely about the environmental impact, but also about the fate of the rural poor, 100 mln of whom have been uprooted to make way for dams and reservoirs in the last 50 years.

Local officials told Interfax that efforts to industrialize the region have required the large-scale development of hydroelectricity. As it stands, only a fraction of the province’s hydropower potential has been realized, they said. Critics, on the other hand, point out that the region’s power shortages are largely seasonal because of the fluctuations in water levels, and building even more hydropower capacity would not solve the problems.

The Dujiangyan area, now smothered by a white November mist, has been transformed in recent years into a tourist site, its entrance overshadowed by three imposing billboards depicting the visits by Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin, all standing on an identical spot on a bridge overlooking the area where the river’s excess water is channeled off. Visitors are encouraged to turn around at the point where the flood waters from the Min River are diverted into the Chengdu plain, but a few kilometers further upstream lies a new construction, the Dujiangyan Hydropower Station, and that is where the tourism stops.

While less controversial than the Pubugou Hydropower Station in Sichuan, where as many as 100,000 residents staged a series of bitter protests against the local government last October, the problems that emerged at Dujiangyan are in many ways more typical of the way the authorities are spending state funds to handle the issues of relocation.

According to Fan Xiao, a noted critic of hydropower construction at the Sichuan Tourism Geological Research Center, the local government had earmarked a section of highland for the Dujiangyan migrants, and invested the relocation funds into improving the land and building new houses. However, at the last minute, the government claimed that the land was unsuitable for human habitation and could experience subsidence. Nevertheless, the government subsequently sold the land on to a third party for a significant profit, Fan said, while the migrants, already forced to move out of their original homes when construction began, had no choice but to live with relatives until the authorities provided an alternative.

The problem at Dujiangyan “wasn’t that serious”, said Wang Yuan, the head of the Energy Office of the Sichuan Province Development and Reform Commission. Wang, a hydrologist by training, was bullish about the prospects of hydropower, and dismissive of the waves of criticism emerging from environmental groups and non-government organizations. China, after all, needs electricity – Sichuan more than most – and the level of development is currently far lower than one might expect.

“Only 20% of China’s hydropower has been developed,” Wang told Interfax, “compared to 60-70% in the US. There is a great potential here. In Sichuan, only about 10% [of potential capacity] had been developed by the end of last year.”

Experts like Chen Guojie of the China Academy of Sciences have expressed their concern about the “rampant” overdevelopment of the rivers in China’s southwestern regions, even comparing the situation to the incompetent construction of backyard steel smelters during the ill-fated Great Leap Forward of 1957.

However, the criticism is misplaced, said Wang Yuan. It is unfair to castigate China for damming its rivers when countries like Norway, the US and Russia have dammed them to a much larger extent, he said. Furthermore, although Sichuan has a plentiful gas and coal resources, the development of hydropower is much cheaper and, crucially, much cleaner. Those who criticize the impact of hydropower on the environment should consider the alternatives, he said, and the deterioration in air quality that would inevitably occur were the province to build more thermal power plants. Wang noted that although Sichuan has a long-term plan to building a nuclear power station, with the Min River named by experts as a possible location, it was unlikely to be in a position to do so for at least a decade.

Interfax, September 10, 2002