Water engineer Zhang Guangdou’s support for China’s big dams ensured a smooth career, capped now by a million-yuan prize. Huang Wanli, meanwhile, spoke out about the projects’ risks, and endured harsh punishment.

Work is scheduled to begin on the Xiluodu dam in late December, the vice-governor of Sichuan province has announced.

(June 8, 2002) A lot of China’s celebrated economic growth is made at the cost of human health,’ says Wen Bo, Beijing representative of Pacific Environment.

(June 5, 2002) Local governments are scrambling to raise money to relocate hundreds of rare and ancient trees from the area due to be flooded next year by the Three Gorges reservoir. So far, four of the trees have been moved to higher ground, but officials say they lack funds to continue the work.

We started an Internet news service called Three Gorges Probe to make news about the dam available to the 56 million Chinese citizens who depend on the Internet for independent information.

(May 30, 2002) Deputy premier Wen Jiabao has stressed the importance of water conservation in tackling the looming environmental crisis in parched north China. But Mr. Wen, who is expected to succeed Zhu Rongji when the Chinese premier steps down next year, also voiced support for the controversial plan to siphon a huge volume of water from the Yangtze River and transfer it north to the arid Beijing-Tianjin region.

‘In China, where the state is committed to protecting the market for its own pet power projects … private investors are going to be in the dark about the viability of their investments,’ says Probe International’s Grainne Ryder.

China’s vice-minister of health has reiterated the importance of thoroughly cleaning and decontaminating the bottom of the future Three Gorges reservoir to protect water quality and avert the spread of disease.

China has been experiencing increasingly long flood seasons over the past few years, according to a recent Operations Update by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.

Three men died yesterday morning and four others are fighting for their lives after scaffolding at the Three Gorges dam construction site collapsed, sending workers plunging to the ground.