China’s giant dam faces huge problems

(January 7, 2001) When China started building the giant Three Gorges Dam here in 1993, its leadership sought to use the undertaking — the country’s most ambitious engineering project since the Great Wall — to highlight the superiority of its socialist system. But now, halfway into the construction, some Chinese officials, engineers and activists say the project has instead become a testimony to malfeasance, incompetence and systemic weakness.