(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.

An average of 73 small dams a year have collapsed in China in the past five decades, Zhang Jiyao, the vice-minister of water resources, told a recent national conference on dam safety. Between 1954 and last year, 3,459 dams had collapsed, 3,434 of which were considered small-scale, he said, but gave no indication of fatalities.

Villagers near Guangzhou in southern China have clashed with police in a dispute over land on which housing for Three Gorges dam migrants is planned, the Hong Kong-based Apple Daily (Pingguo Ribao) reports.

(April 30, 2002) As Chinese companies ‘go global’, NGO campaigners are increasingly concerned about Beijing’s model of international development, writes Ben Schiller.

Police found a truck parked at a wharf near the dam to be carrying a potentially explosive load.

Downstream, the mountainous walls of the Three Gorges Dam are rising skywards and reaching out across the river they will block next year. Over the coming months, the temple and the surrounding towns and villages for hundreds of miles will be evacuated in preparation for the flood. The waters will climb almost 200 metres, creating a lake the length of England.