Three Gorges Dam

10 Key excerpts on "Three Gorges Dam"

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  China's Economic Challenge: Smashing the Iron Rice Bowl

  Smashing the Iron Rice Bowl

  • Neil C. Hughes(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter Five The Three Gorges Dam Revisited

       

  Approaching the Three Gorges.

  Passage contains an image

  W hen China celebrated fifty years of Communism on October 1, 1999, Premier Zhu Rongji proudly hailed the enormous achievements of the Chinese people, particularly the economic transformation undertaken during the previous twenty years. But the project that is meant to symbolize these achievements remains mired in controversy. Since it was first proposed by Sun Yatsen in 1919, the idea of damming the Three Gorges of the Yangtze River and constructing the world’s largest hydroelectric generation and water-control project has fascinated China’s leaders. Although the project had the personal endorsement of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, internal opposition was surprisingly strong and was silenced only during the crackdown on dissent after the 1989 Tiananmen protest. Meanwhile, international criticism—especially of the project’s far-reaching environmental impacts—rose to a fever pitch. The United States and Canadian governments and the World Bank and Asian Development Bank, which had showed initial interest in the project, quickly backed away. China went ahead anyway, determined to make the Three Gorges Dam the crowning success of its drive to modernize its economy. The first earth was moved in 1993, and by the end of 1997, two giant cofferdams enclosed the Yangtze River and construction of the dam itself had begun. Even die-hard opponents realized that nothing would stop the project, and the furor died down.

  Although other dams are bigger, Three Gorges will consume 27 million cubic meters of concrete, almost enough to pave over Washington, D.C. It will be capable of generating two-thirds more energy—84 billion kilowatt hours per year—than any other dam in the world. The dam will be 1.2 miles wide and 185 meters high. Behind it the water level will rise as high as 175 meters, submerging 10 percent of the Three Gorges, 13 cities, 140 towns, 360 villages, 1,300 known archaeological sites, and 62,000 acres of farms and orchards, and will create a reservoir 632 kilometers long. By its own admission, the government will have to resettle at least 1,133,800 people who presently live in the reservoir area below the 175-meter level. According to official 1997 estimates, it will cost US$24.4 billion. The dam is scheduled to enter into full operation in 2009, seventeen years after construction officially began.

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  Water, Technology and the Nation-State

  • Filippo Menga, Erik Swyngedouw, Filippo Menga, Erik Swyngedouw(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  13Building a dam for China in the Three Gorges region, 1919–1971 Covell F. Meyskens

  In the early twentieth century, Chinese leaders began to contemplate building a large dam on the Yangzi River that would generate electricity, boost river transport, and end its history of floods. They paid particular attention to the Three Gorges region, where the river ended its descent from the Sichuan Basin into Hubei province’s Jianghan Plain. This chapter examines Chinese efforts to construct a dam near the Three Gorges between 1919 and 1971. It concentrates on this block of time, because the first dam proposal appeared in 1919, and the Gezhouba Dam became that place in 1971. Past scholarship has overlooked this period and focused on the building of the Three Gorges Dam (TGD) in the 1990s (Dai, 1998).

  I take a different tack and trace the Chinese government’s aspiration to make a TGD to a new understanding of technology’s power precipitated by Western imperialist pressures in the mid-nineteenth century. Prior to Western imperialism’s arrival, elites in China did not take the rapid expansion of technological power as a primary economic goal (Wong, 1997; Elvin, 1973). This changed when Western imperialists and their scion – Meiji Japan – used technological strength to assert influence over East Asia. In response, elites in China embraced the Western notion that technological self-strengthening was central to a country’s economy and that its territory was a repository of resources useful for industrialization (Halsey, 2015; Wu, 2015; Pietz, 2014).

  After laying this historical groundwork, the chapter highlights three defining features of Chinese efforts to erect the TGD. First, Chinese elites manifested a belief in the national benefits of technologically redesigning the environment of the entire Yangzi region. Second, Chinese leaders acted like nationalist elites in other late-developing countries and advocated using state power to advance industry (Gerschenkron, 1962: 5–30). Third, Chinese elites repeatedly sought out foreign assistance to offset domestic shortages of industrial capital. These three trends engendered two approaches to technology, or what Thomas Hughes (1983) calls technological styles, which reflected different understandings of how to use experts, labor, and capital.

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  Policy Making in China

  • Kenneth Lieberthal, Michel Oksenberg(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  We, therefore, deal with them in the con-text of these larger developments. Four Modernizations and the Three Gorges Dam The adoption of the four modernizations policy in the 1970's led to a commitment to increase the country's GNP fourfold by the end of the century. Mid-1980's estimates indicated that this task would require that by the year 2000 China be able to generate 240 million kilowatts of elec-tricity. The Three Gorges Dam could at best contribute less than 15 mil-lion of these kilowatts. This urgent energy situation created strong in-332 Three Gorges Dam PROJECT centives to adopt policies that would provide maximum electrical generating capacity at minimum direct cost and with the shortest possi-ble lead time—that is, to build thermal plants rather than massive hy-droelectric facilities. Other considerations, though, diminish the allure of thermal plants. Thermal power poses troublesome environmental problems, especially given the high percentage of China's power generation that is fueled by coal. Major new thermal power facilities also require new rail construc-tion and other additional efforts that affect comparative cost calculations. On balance, the mid-1980's pressures to increase electrical output at the least short-term cost evidently weighed against start-up of construc-tion of the Three Gorges Dam. In the coal sector, as explained in Chapter Seven, similar pressures produced an increased emphasis on develop-ment of local coal facilities, even though over the long run greater in-vestment in major central mines would probably have been a wiser strat-egy. Quick payoffs for minimum investment appear, then, to have become the preferred way to meet the ambitious four modernizations goals. Although the four modernizations policy highlighted the critical im-portance of adding to electrical power generation capabilities, this did not necessarily make it more likely that a dam at the Three Gorges would be seen as a good investment strategy.

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  The Global Environment

  Institutions, Law and Policy

  • Norman J. Vig, Regina S. Axelrod(Authors)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  24. A major critic of hydropower throughout the world has made this argument for all big dams, which he believes violate the fundamental principles of sustainable development. Patrick McCully, Silenced Rivers: The Ecology and Politics of Large Dams (London: Zed Books, 1997), 140. Species endangered by the Three Gorges Dam include the Chinese river dolphin, the Yangtze River sturgeon, and the Siberian crane.
• 25. See “Project Title: China: Efficient Industrial Boilers,” Proposal to the World Bank Global Environmental Trust Fund (http://www.worldbank.org/htm/def ).
• 26. Fei Xiaotong, Peasant Life in China: A Field Study of Country Life in the Yangtze Valley (New York: Dutton, 1939), 181.
• 27. Estimates of the annual flow of rock and earth into the Yangtze range from 40 million to 640 million tons. Vaclav Smil, The Bad Earth: Environmental Degradation in China (Armonk, N.Y.: Sharpe, 1984), 87.
• 28. Jun Jing, “Rural Resettlement: Past Lessons for the Three Gorges Project,” China Journal