The River at the Centre of the World (31 page)

The receptionist, a solid woman in her forties, proved more than amenable when we asked if any foreigners were staying. In the past few months there had been dozens of groups, she said. This week she had, let's see – Japanese, she offered, and Canadians. She turned the computer screen towards us, and let us read down the list of likely surnames. There was a Brown in room 1204, an Ingrams in 1218, a MacFarlane in 806. All good Scots-Canadian names, it seemed. I called Mr Brown on the house phone, hoping that he had not succumbed to an Untold Charm Without. But he answered, and I asked him if he had by any chance anything to do with the Three Gorges Dam.

‘Too right,’ he said. ‘I'm exhausted. But the boss is in the bar. Deep negotiations, you know. Better approach him carefully.’

The bar was dark and ice cold. A karaoke machine was showing pictures but, mercifully, it had been turned down so that it was almost inaudible. In the darkest corner sat a group of three foreigners and four Chinese, huddled around a table. The foreigners were nursing beers; the Chinese had peanuts. This was what I had expected to find: for these were the Canadians, chasing work.

The bartender said there had been groups of similarly eager and anxious
lao wai
coming to his bar almost every day this year. They had been meeting the same Chinese, all of whom came from the Three Gorges Project Corporation, which he knew was housed in a modern office building near by. ‘They want to be part of our dam,’ he said. Last month, the bartender said, he had taken his wife and children to see a dam exhibition on the ground floor of the corporation's office. ‘It is very great, what we are doing. We have good reason to be proud. My children thought it was wonderful. So powerful. So grand.’

The Canadians did not take quite so lyrical an approach. Nor, it seemed, had they taken much heed of the world's criticism of the project. They were there quite simply because they wanted a piece of the action.

They turned out to be fairly small players – an Ontario-based firm that had put in for a $35 million contract to design project-management system software, something that would enable the Chinese to organize their work more efficiently. When they met me they were at first dismayed at having been found out, and then became exceptionally discreet. They were well aware that back home the majority of the Canadian public had been appalled by what it knew of the dam, and would not look kindly upon firms from Canada who came to China looking for dam-building business.
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But they were far from being alone: it turned out that dozens of other firms from America and Europe and Japan had been scurrying to Yichang in the weeks before, specifically to court business. Still others were expected.

I was shown a list marked ‘confidential’: among the names of those arriving in China and touting for work, or celebrating their having been given some, were General Electric, Hitachi, Mitsubishi, Krupp, Mannesmann, Siemens (who had opened an office in Wuhan), Caterpillar, Nomura, Alcatel, Framatome (the French atomic-power experts, already endeared to the Chinese because of the help they had given to build an equally controversial
can-the-Chinese-really-be-trusted-to-run-it
nuclear generating station at Daya Bay, thirty miles to the windward of Hong Kong), Atlas Copco, Terex Trucks, Brown Boveri and the Finnish Foreign Trade Association. With assistance from companies like these, the Chinese builders will probably not want – at least in the early stages of building – for earthmovers, dump trucks, compressors, drilling rigs, communications gear, heavy steel construction equipment, turbines, electrical transmission towers, ship lock gates or high-powered diesel engines. The only item in short supply in the early stages of building was likely, it seemed, to be money. Given what is known of the state of the Chinese treasury, the want of $36 billion seemed to put the country at least two sandwiches short of a picnic.

The world's financial community had been extremely leery of the project ever since – and indeed because of – the rebellion in the National People's Congress in April 1992 and since the World Bank had pulled out. But the Chinese met this resistance squarely: they decided to go ahead with construction on their own and by doing so demonstrate that the project would eventually become attractive as an investment, even if it wasn't at the outset. It was an adroit bit of gamesmanship; and when combined with adroitly applied doses of blackmail – suggestions to foreign banks, that
if you don't help us finance the dam, you won't get any more business in China at all
– it began to work.

The risks of lending money to China are manifold. The country has a total foreign debt of some $90 billion, and a dismal record of welshing that has not endeared her to more prudent minds in the investment community. This particular project, which will take at least seventeen years to complete and will not begin to generate electricity (and thus revenue) until 2003 at the very earliest – and which is plagued by technical opposition, by environmental implications and by massive sociological upheavals – is even less attractive than most. And yet, big American investment firms like Merrill Lynch and banks like Morgan Stanley were early in expressing an interest; while maintaining a discreet distance and the silence of the conclave, they have stuck with the project, offering advice, strategy and, it is assumed, at least promises of eventual funds. Others in America and Japan – Goldman Sachs, Salomon Brothers, Daiwa Securities and Nomura – have taken an interest, too, committing nothing, but keeping their options open and their powder dry. For their part the Chinese offer huge rewards: vast stretches of the Yangtze valley are being opened up to foreign investment, with those who agree to help with the dam being given preference over those who don't.

Politically correct investment strategists have taken a toll on the bankers' enthusiasms, however. A number of investment funds in America now take the view that banks should not invest in environmentally or sociologically unacceptable projects – the Three Gorges Dam being, in their view, a classic of unacceptability. And so they – organizations like New York City Comptroller's Investment Responsibility Office and the Boston-based Franklin Research and Development Corporation – target banks in which they have shares and who are thinking of doing the kind of business of which the shareholders disapprove.

New York's pension funds currently hold $18 million worth of Morgan Stanley shares and $47 million worth of Merrill Lynch: they have clout, in other words. If, following advice from the Investment Responsibility office, the city says it will not touch the Three Gorges project with a bargepole, as it has intimated, then it can bring considerable pressure to bear on the bankers who wish to. Thus is the world becoming more global; in other contexts and from other points of view, thus is it becoming less democratic, thus do international corporations affect the lives of millions, and thus can men in one corner of the world make decisions that have unimagined repercussions on the far side of the planet.

Whether the American and Japanese banks do or do not invest in the project is, for the time being, a moot point. China is raising the first tranches of funding itself, on the domestic market. It has levied a 2 per cent sales tax on all electricity consumed in the country. The Bank of China, the People's Construction Bank, the State Development Bank, all have plenty of foreign exchange and have begun lending it to the dam builders. In Hong Kong, there are countless banks and investment houses who are careless of such niceties as environmental ruin and human suffering – a firm called Peregrine, for example, already doing business in North Korea, professed that it would be ‘fun' to raise money for the Three Gorges Dam. And doubtless firms like Peregrine will end up making money, and will crow lustily at Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley, if indeed these firms bow to what the brokers at Peregrine would see as the wishy-washiness of the greens and the human rights advocates, and decide not to help raise money.

The project, in other words, is going ahead, and now looks unstoppable. Li Peng came down from Beijing to pour the first concrete in December 1994 – at a ceremony to which foreign journalists were pointedly not invited. Some 20,000 workers toil on the site; by the end of 1996 there will be 35,000. Many of the workers are soldiers. Some are said to be prisoners, labouring on the project at no cost. Coffer dams are going up, lock gates are being cast, canals are being dug, diversion tunnels are being blasted. Yichang will soon have its new, international standard airport. There will be new roads and rail links, and a $3 billion network of power lines. The first of the twenty-six generating sets will be ordered soon: most will come from abroad, and every generator maker on the planet is looking eagerly to get the business.

One of the reasons that is put forward, once in a while, to bolster the case against damming the river, is that by doing so the very dignity of the great stream is being violated. Interrupting the river's flow is seen as an insult, these critics say – and one day the river gods, to the detriment of all, will seek to avenge it.

Towards the end of his masterly novella
A Single Pebble
, John Hersey's narrator, after spending so long among the dangers of the river rapids and after reaching the very upstream end of the Three Gorges, falls prey to the belief in the great river's ancient sanctity. Gazing up at a trackers' path cut into the hard stone of the cliff above him, he starts to reflect:

To begin with, the path was more than a thousand years old, so Su-ling said: Tang dynasty, she said, and perhaps earlier. Chinese rivermen had been satisfied for a millennium – for more than five times the age of my native country – to use this awful way of getting through the Wind Box Gorge. How could I, in the momentary years of my youth, have a part in persuading these people to tolerate the building of a great modern dam that would take the waters of Tibet and Inner China, with their age-old furies, on its back, there to grow lax and benign? How could I span the gap of a thousand years – a millennium in a day?… The sight of the path made me wonder whether a dam was the right thing with which to start closing the gap.

But for all his musings, and for all the opposition to the construction of the Three Gorges Dam, this charming argument is now in fact too late. A dam already has been built, and has stood across the Yangtze now since 1980. It is a low dam – just 150 feet high, a quarter the height of the barrage upstream. It was constructed by a provincial government, with one Beijing ministry working as an ally, and it was done as a dry run, a dress rehearsal, a test bed for the great dam yet to come, and a source of revenue to help pay for it. And in almost all ways it has been a miserable, ugly source of lamentation.

It is called the Gezhouba Dam, and I could just about see it if I leaned out of my hotel window and peered to the right, upstream. The channel along which the cargo ships beat noisily past our hotel was in fact artificial, part of the Gezhouba's downstream architecture; and at night the klieg lights illuminating the dam's three massive ship locks lit up the sky for miles around. There was also a constant sizzling sound in the background, like white noise: it came from high-tension cables that snaked and looped their way out from the dam's powerhouse, and the pylons that radiated in all directions carried tens of thousands of volts and some of them fizzed and sparked with disturbing displays of energy. Not all of them, however: one, a main transmission line to Shanghai, carries no electricity at all – thus presenting a measure of the technical failure that the dam has been.

Up close the dam was a sensationally horrible thing – a 1½-mile-long wall of grey-brown concrete, patched and rust-speckled, caparisoned with gaunt control towers, festooned with sizzling cables. Behind it the river lay placid, captured and seemingly tamed, hemmed in between the rising hills, a strange embarrassment. To build the dam the engineers had had to stop the river's flow for a day and a half in the midwinter of 1981: the immeasurable indignity that John Hersey had suggested, and for a river that had rushed vigorously along for tens of thousands of years. But such things as halting rivers are meat and drink to dam builders worldwide: an aspect of their pathology that makes them want to tame nature, to stop the unstoppable, to demonstrate the power of cold engineering logic when ranged against the brutish and unfocused forces of raw nature. Communist dam builders take this kind of thing even more personally – actually to stop the Yangtze in her tracks was a feat that Mao Zedong felt proud to have overseen, as though he had somehow drawn strength from it, had derived an even greater measure of popular heroism, and still further sanction for the might of his chosen ideology. And Mao had been personally very committed to the Gezhouba project: after all, it had been started in his honour, and in the midst of the Cultural Revolution, on his birthday – 26 December, 1970.

Downstream of the dam, where the sluice gates had been opened, the water gushed and frothed onto the spillways, liberated again, free to feed the great stream below. From the two powerhouses came the hum of the twenty-one great generators that, it is said, were designed to produce 2700 megawatts, enough power to light the houses of 30 million Chinese – or to fulfil the power needs of just 1 million Europeans, for whom electrical power is much more universal a requirement. By any standards the dam is a big one: by the standard of the Three Gorges Dam it is not, however: for every megawatt that Gezhouba is designed to whip from the waters, the big dam is set to produce eight.

The two biggest ship locks were impressive, though, especially from aboard an upriver steamer. I had done the transit several times, and it never failed to awe me, whatever my feelings for the aesthetics of the dam itself. Our ship would nose its way between a cone of flashing buoys to be confronted by the solid concrete wall, looming huge and high. Directly in front was a gateway of two enormous steel doors, so tall it hurt to stare up at their tops.

We would slide gingerly between the gateways, and then into the lock chamber itself, hugging the sides so closely that I could reach out and touch the slimy concrete. Then we were in, along with ten thousand tons of other shipping – empty barges coming up to haul coal downstream, passenger boats, a luxury cruise liner or two, a collection of old motorized
ma-yang zi
– and the huge doors behind would close silently and swiftly. As soon as they had done so, unseen sluices opened in the base of the two upstream doors and the water in the chamber would rise steadily.