Probe International

China has used both the SARS health crisis and the crackdown on the
falun gong spiritual movement as reasons to detain migrants who dare to
complain about the Three Gorges resettlement operation.

Deirdre Chetham, the author of Before the Deluge: The Vanishing World of the Yangtze’s Three Gorges, is featured tonight on WBAI’s Asia Pacific Web broadcast, starting at 8 p.m.

People who were moved to make way for the Three Gorges project gathered at Maoping near the dam site on June 1 to watch the reservoir begin to fill and submerge their old homes.

Experts from Beijing taking part in a final inspection before the
Three Gorges reservoir is filled next month are being handled with
special care by project officials desperate to prevent a local outbreak
of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS).

The current health crisis in China will have no impact on plans to
fill the Three Gorges reservoir next month, state media reports.

A Three Gorges Project official has said that 1.35 million residents in the dam area will need be relocated, 220,000 more than the original plan.

Shipping companies on the Yangtze River face a steep drop in income for the next two months while navigation is suspended near the Three Gorges dam.

‘The dam will never collapse and the reservoir will never flood the cities along the downstream valley,’ Lu Youmei reassures students at Beijing University.

Li Peng, long-time champion of the Three Gorges dam, has raised concerns about the project’s giant turbines, which will be larger and more complicated than any ever attempted before.

Dr. Wei critically reviews the revised "Resettlement Rules and Regulations of the Three Gorges Dam.".