Qiqi, the only captive example of the world’s most endangered dolphin species, died yesterday, Xinhua reports. Yangtze River pollution and development projects, including dams, have been blamed for the species’ decline.

40 migrant farmers, forced from their villages by construction of the Three Gorges Dam, have been detained by police after protesting discrimination and hardship in their new homes in Qingdao, reports the Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy.

Villagers along the Yangtze are reluctantly leaving home, John Schauble reports from Fengdu. No one is under any illusions that life will be the same, let alone any better.

(December 21, 2005) A group of Sichuan University undergraduates has won accolades for a research project that warns of the serious threat that new dams planned for the upper Yangtze pose to the river’s wild fish, and the communities that depend on them.

In China, the world’s largest dam impounds floodwater, but without other controls, erosion will persist.

The 100 teams toiling to save relics in the Three Gorges area ‘are fighting a losing battle, racing against a deadline they simply can’t hope to meet,’ China Daily reports.

This year’s rescue efforts may have been exaggerated, Richard McGregor and James Kynge report

Authorities in China are stepping up a massive anti-flood effort, mobilizing tens of thousands of people to shore up the nation’s second biggest freshwater lake which threatens to burst its banks and create a disaster worse than the deadly floods of 1998.