The River at the Centre of the World (28 page)

All the great structures that were built around the world during the dam builders' salad days – the Hoover and the Grand Coulee in western America, the Vaiont in Italy, the Grand Dixence in Switzerland, the Daniel Johnson in Quebec – were constructed in situations like this. A steep-sided valley and a fast-flowing stream were there first; the dam went up, and a few years later, in the place of valley and stream there was a consequently deep lake and a consequently tamed river – and fewer downstream floods. As an additional incentive, which the builders could weigh against the likely vast capital cost of the project, there would be electrical power aplenty to sell, from all the potential energy stored in the dam-impounded lake.

Dam builders, fired by an almost religious enthusiasm for their work and its long-term profitability, have been on a construction spree since the 1930s. This was when men like John L. Savage and his US Bureau of Reclamation colleagues were persuaded that mighty barrages across great rivers could have incalculable benefits – both in power generation and in flood prevention – for countries with expanding industrial economies. So they and their disciples around the world have put up thousands of dams – of which more than a hundred are the so-called super dams, truly immense constructions of concrete or earth whose walls soar more than 500 feet.

Almost all of the world's big rivers have been stopped up by monsters like these – the Ganges, the Zambezi, the Parana, the Nile, the Indus, the Danube, the Niger, the great Amazonian tributary known as the Tocantins. Only the Zaire (formerly the Congo), the Amazon proper – and the Yangtze – remain unblocked by a true giant dam. And from the thirties on an endless slew of good reasons have been put forward for adding the Yangtze to the list.

But if flood control had been principally behind Sun Yat-sen's original idea, his successors turned their thoughts more keenly to what was initially the almost incidental matter of generated electricity. The Three Gorges, it turned out, is ideally placed as a nexus of power generation. Most of China's factories – electricity-hungry factories, that is – have been built in the east of the country. Most of her mountains – ravine-rich, river-filled mountains, that is – lie at the other end of the nation, in the west. The Three Gorges site is almost in the dead centre of the country; it is, in fact, the closest river-filled ravine to the Chinese east – meaning that, in terms of economy, it has to be the most efficient site for delivering power to the centres of Chinese industry. The power transmission lines – not a trivial factor in the calculation of generating economics – could be much shorter with a Three Gorges site than with one in, say, far western Yunnan.

Developing a hydropower system has perceived environmental benefits, too; not least, it could lessen China's reliance on fossil fuels. The smoke and other emissions from China's vast coal reserves have to be seen to be believed: it sometimes seems a pall of yellow-brown smog hangs over all of the flat country outside the Gorges – a combination of coal-fired power stations and roadside brick kilns, all belching fumes into the air, full blast. A hydropower station somewhere in the Three Gorges, generating thousands of megawatts, would be bound to lessen the nation's reliance on dirty fuels: more and more, the planners who followed up Dr Sun's bold plan agreed that a Three Gorges dam was an ideal creation for the country's future.

But however ideal the Three Gorges project might seem to an enthusiast, it took engineers and politicians and military experts
forty-nine years
to choose the exact site for it. It took
seventy-five years
, moreover, from the day Dr Sun made his first visionary statement until the day the first sod was moved. Few construction projects anywhere in the world have taken quite so long to realize. Here was the time scale of a cathedral.

The matter of the right site was the most vexing. Most of those directly involved in the decades of discussions agreed on one thing: that any dam should be built a few miles upstream from Yichang, at the very end of the Xiling, the lowest of the Three Gorges. But then civil war, insurrection, terrorism, shortages of cash, anti-foreign sentiment, changes in ideology, power struggles and sudden caprices of the power elite all conspired to slow a more precise choice than this down to subglacial speed. The engineers and the scientists reported and recommended until they were blue in the face: but for half a century, nothing was done.

J. S. Lee – a British-educated Chinese geologist who went on, under the name of Li Siguang, to work for the People's Republic and to become dignified by the title of the Father of Modern Chinese Geology – performed the original surveys in the 1930s and suggested that the best site could be at a turn in the river near the village of Sandouping. George Barbour, the American who worked with Lee, thought much the same.

Then in the 1940s along came John Savage, the American dam builder from Denver who professed himself to have ‘fallen in love with the Yangtze's water resources' – not with the Yangtze, but with its water resources – ‘at first sight’. Savage was with the Reclamation Bureau; he was a legendary figure in American dam building and his involvement in those early discussions was a harbinger of the intimate involvement of Americans in the scheme.

He suggested six sites, the highest just a few hundred yards down from the lower end of the Xiling Gorge, the lowest at a point some nine miles above Yichang. The bureau drew detailed designs for a long concrete barrage with a series of ship locks that would allow navigation beyond the dam – a critical aspect of a project that, of course, was designed specifically to block what was a very busy shipping route. In 1947 a team of fifty Americans worked for a while at one of the sites, only too aware that the Nationalist government that had hired them was, in all likelihood, not long for this world: Mao's Communists were gathering strength day by day. The cancellation of the project later in that same year came as no surprise to the outsiders: the torch would have to be passed to a new government, all suspected – and it was by no means sure that Mao, once he had gained power, would be as committed to the Three Gorges dam as his fervent ideological opponents had been.

It was a little later that John Hersey, the China-born journalist and writer who produced what remains the most lyrical of all books about the Yangtze,
A Single Pebble
, offered his vision of the project to the outside world. The hero of his novella is a young American engineer who is taken on one of the great trading junks, a
ma-yang zi
, to survey the Three Gorges and ‘to see whether it would make sense for my company to sell the Chinese government a vast power project in the river's famous Gorges’.

The story's theme is the life of the trackers, the stoic and tenacious men who, with bare feet, broad shoulders and bamboo hawsers, pull his junk up through the Gorges' rapids. But more than once the narrator imagines his beloved dam, with the kind of wild rhetorical flourishings of which Mao Zedong would have eagerly approved:

The second evening in Witches' Mountain Gorge, just after we had spar-moored for the night against a big boulder in a quiet cove, and while most of the trackers rested on their haunches on the rocks ashore, sipping tea, I sat alone on the conning deck watching blossoms of sunset unfold on the edges of the small delicate misty shrub-like clouds that stood naturalized in the visible sky over the gorge upstream – when all at once I imagined a dam.

There it was! Between those two sheer cliffs that tightened the gorge a half-mile upstream, there leaped up in my imagination a beautiful concrete straight-gravity dam which raised the upstream water five hundred feet; much of its curving span was capped by an overflow spillway controlled by drum gates and tube valve outlets; and a huge hydraulic jump apron designed to pass unprecedented volumes of water stood ready to protect both the dam and the lower countryside against the freshets of springtime. Ingenious lift-locks at either side carried junks up and down on truly hydraulic elevators. The power plant was entirely embedded in the cliffs on both sides of the river. The strength of the Great River, rushing through the diversion tunnels that had been used for the construction of the dam, and through other great tubes and shafts bored through solid rock, and finally into the whirling gills of nearly a hundred power units, created a vast hum of ten million kilowatts of light and warmth and progress.

The Communists loved the idea as keenly as did John Hersey's narrator, and as keenly as had their Nationalist predecessors. Once they had their house in some kind of order they set up committees to consider the various sites. Drilling rigs went up, core samples were taken – and in 1959 the committee said it would choose one of three sites, all near Sandouping. A year later the uppermost of those three, a narrowing of the river close to a low island called Zhongbao, was finally chosen.

Except it turned out not to be final at all. The military promptly weighed in, and a committee of generals decided that at Sandouping the river was still far too wide to allow for adequate air defence. Since a gigantic dam like this would be a prime site for terrorist or foreign attack, good defence was of prime concern. So the Chinese government went back to look for more sites – and then, in another corner, the Cultural Revolution began. The plans for the dam were, on the one hand, disrupted; and on the other hand, they became embroiled in politics – the dam was seen by Mao and his allies as perfect propaganda for the promotion of his authority and power.

Mao's poem ‘Swimming' envisaged the structure in two lines of verse, lines that helped invest the project with an almost mythic importance. Building a dam across the Yangtze was in many ways like swimming across the Yangtze – it was a means of demonstrating man's supremacy, and Mao's supremacy, and the Party's supremacy, over the Chinese landscape, as well as being the realization of the worthiest of ambitions. Come the late 1950s, every cadre in the land had started to see in Three Gorges Dam a perpetual memorial to the greatness of the Great Helmsman. If there were any doubts, any concerns about the harsh realities of the dam's construction, of its likely costs, its long-term impact, its risks, its practical disadvantages – all were swept away under the relentless imperium of dogma and fanatic belief.

In the midst of the political chaos of the time there came news of yet more potential sites, and site selection took on as frantic a tempo as that of the Great Leap Forward. The project began to lose contact with reality. Someone piped up to claim he liked a hitherto unmentioned place called Shipai; a committee thought that this was indeed a good place, and for a while all effort was devoted to looking at Shipai. But three years later another committee rejected it:
unstable geology
. Other new names joined the list: Huanglingmiao, Meirentuo, the Nanjin Pass. Two years later still came the recommendation that the dam be built at yet another place, this one called Taipingxi: on this site the builders would need less concrete, but there would have to be more costly excavation. Taipingxi the generals also liked: they could set up lots of anti-aircraft guns here, they reported. But the excavation costs scuppered this choice a year or so later.

Back and forth matters went, committee after committee doing and then undoing the work of one another. But finally, once Mao was dead and the Cultural Revolution safely buried and half-forgotten and the Gang of Four in prison, a more serious-minded set of committees – a set that was apolitical, to the extent that in Communist China any government body can be apolitical – made its once-and-for-all-decision. It came via a terse report from the Ministry of Water Conservancy to the State Council in November 1979: whatever the shortcomings of the site for air defence, the original place that had been suggested fifty years before, Sandouping, was where the Three Gorges Dam should and would in fact be built. Now there was merely the question of how big the dam should be, and whether all those who mattered in China and beyond would agree to build it.

The international community was at first excited. The Americans – firms and organizations like Bechtel, the US Army Corps of Engineers, Merrill Lynch, and Coopers and Lybrand, all of whom have expertise in huge capital projects – formed a technical liaison group. The Canadians gave money and said they would be involved. The World Bank began to research the scheme. Sweden and Japan talked openly of pumping in funds. A technical debate began, raging throughout the world's dam-building community.

The question of how high – how tall the dam, and how high the level of the reservoir behind it – has been bitterly debated for years. A high reservoir level – anything more than 500 feet – mean that more electricity could be generated and deep-draught ships could be accommodated upstream of the dam: but it also would mean that the dam wall itself would have to be taller, and that more people living beside the river would have to be moved as their towns, villages and houses flooded. There would also be little slack available to be taken up in the event of a flood. A lower reservoir level, on the other hand, would cost less – fewer people would need to be moved, and the dam could be lower; but with a proposed low level of around 450 feet, rapids would begin to appear in the upper part of the Gorges, big ships would have difficulty navigating there, and there would be less power potential for the electricity distributors to sell.

A decision was finally announced by Li Peng, the Chinese prime minister, in 1992: the ‘normal pool level’, as it is known, of the proposed Three Gorges Dam would be a stunning 573 feet.
*
The dam would be 610 feet high, and it would be 6864 feet from one side to the other – more than five times as wide as the huge Hoover Dam. The Aswan Dam in Egypt is twice as long and half as high – but it is a rock-fill dam, and not, like this, fashioned from concrete and iron. The huge wall proposed for the Yangtze would swallow up 26 million tons of concrete and 250,000 tons of steel and it would create a 600-square-mile lake stretching back from the dam for some 372 miles – backing water up in the Gorges and across nearly half of the Red Basin to a point considerably past the city of Chongqing.