Category: Three Gorges Probe

Three Dams Project

(July 14, 2009) China has undertaken the greatest project since the erection of the Great Wall and the Grand Canal — the Three Gorges Dam project. The Three Gorges Dam will be the largest hydropower station and dam in the world, with a 1.2 mile stretch of concrete and a 370 mile-long reservoir and 525 feet deep.

Three Gorges Madness: An Interview with Dai Qing

(December 24, 1997) THE DAUGHTER OF A REVOLUTIONARY MARTYR, a former missile technician and one-time intelligence agent, Dai Qing is China’s foremost investigative reporter. Dai Qing first criticized China’s Three Gorges dam project in the Chinese daily press, and compiled and edited Yangtze!, Yangtze!, a collection of essays by prominent Chinese intellectuals opposed to the dam, in 1989.

The Yangtze Dam: Feat or Folly?

(November 9, 1997) SANDOUPING, China — Here at what was once a scenic but treacherous bend in the first of the Yangtze River’s legendary three gorges, the Chinese government inched closer today to realizing a vision that combines ambition worthy of pyramid-building Pharaohs with the destructiveness of open-pit coal mining.

Killing mother nature with our green creed

(July 5, 2009) We in Britain are inclined to see the worst in massive state-driven projects, especially when these are promoted by governments that are undemocratic. We were right to be sceptical about the Soviet Union’s decision in the 1960s to divert rivers away from the Aral Sea, now largely a desert, and more recently about China’s Three Gorges Dam, which seems to be causing landslides, the displacement of millions of people and the extinction of the Yangtze River dolphin.