There had always been little doubt that Three Gorges would transform the Yangtze as thoroughly as the Aswan Dam reshaped the Nile and Egyptian society. Deng’s 1978 reforms had done nothing to alter China’s traditional attitude toward water management, and when the dam officially opened in 2006 its extraordinary effort to command nature was on full display: it was an impressive 600 feet high and a mile and a half across, with multitiered ship locks and a nearly 400-mile-long reservoir. If 1.4 million people had been involuntarily relocated in its building, its purported greater good to China was that it promised to control floods on the Yangtze, enhance navigation, generate more electricity than any other dam in the world, and serve as the linchpin for a dozen more hydropower megabases upriver that would begin to fulfill China’s master plan to triple the nation’s hydropower by 2020 and wean it away from its extreme dependency on nonrenewable, dirty coal.
Given the dam’s legacy, activists in China’s sprouting, broadly based environmental movement were astonished a year later, in September 2007, to hear the senior government official responsible for the dam break a long-standing taboo and not only confess, but publicly warn that Three Gorges posed “hidden dangers” that could cause a “huge disaster…if steps are not taken promptly.” He added that China cannot win “economic prosperity at the cost of the environment.” Speculation that he may have spoken out of turn was erased the next day when the government news agency itself covered the event with the headline “China Warns of Environmental ‘Catastrophe’ from Three Gorges Dam.”
Among the litany of worries voiced by dam critics had been severe water pollution, landslides, riverbank collapses, larger earthquakes in a fragile, fault-prone region, flooding and shipping problems upstream, and crippled hydropower potential from heavy silt buildup in the reservoir. Indeed, the warning signs that things were amiss at the dam had been accruing as the reservoir started to fill. Rising water pressure and seepage had caused scores of landslides upstream and on tributaries, killing dozens of farmers and fishermen in mudslides and the 165-foot-high waves heaved up by the crashing mud. Upstream water quality also had deteriorated because the dam impeded the dispersal of industrial pollutants and urban sewage, contaminating the drinking water of tens of thousands and threatening to turn the dam’s reservoir into a giant cesspool. Freshwater shortages turned up in Shanghai at the river’s mouth because the decreased flow in the dammed river was no longer able to offset the force of the tidal inflows from the East China Sea; the metropolis’s tap water became foul-smelling and yellowish with Yangtze pollution. Two weeks after the government warning about Three Gorges, it announced that an additional 3 to 4 million people would have to be relocated due to the pollution and landside threats. A few months later, dozens of ships became stranded in a stretch of Yangtze waterway as the river recorded its lowest level in a century and a half.
Even before the opening of Three Gorges Dam, China’s engineers of the Yangtze had witnessed distressing side effects of their handiwork. Despite the river’s reduced streamflow, terrible floods in 1998 had killed thousands. Deforestation, soil erosion and greater siltation upriver, and the draining of water-absorbing wetlands downriver had combined to create a new type of flood risk on the river. Their dreaded nightmare was a major earthquake in the active fault zone around Three Gorges—possibly made catastrophic by the sheer pressure from the water’s weight in its own reservoir. The tragic, 7.9 magnitude quake of May 2008 in Sichuan province near Dujiangyan, site of Li Bing’s famous third century BC Min River diversion and irrigation works, that killed 80,000, extensively damaged 400 dams and compelled the draining of the giant, 50-story-tall Zipingpu dam reservoir, only 3.5 miles from the quake’s epicenter, might have been a catastrophe beyond imagining had it struck instead 350 miles west at Three Gorges. Indeed, many scientists contended that the anomalously extreme size of the 2008 quake itself may have been caused by geological pressure from the 320 million tons of water in the Zipingpu reservoir—a charge strenuously denied by the government, which also blocked websites suggesting that ongoing giant reservoir-building in the region might be putting inhabitants in jeopardy.
The government’s public warning about Three Gorges reflected a deepening concern among China’s post-Tiananmen leaders of the severity of the environmental danger imperiling China’s future—and their own credibility to govern as public anger boiled with each deadly ecological disaster. Just a few months earlier, in June 2007, some 10,000 middle-class environmental protesters had taken to the streets against the construction of a new chemical plant in the coastal city of Xiamen. This followed the angry national headlines in May that the nation’s third largest lake and famous national beauty spot, Lake Tai, on the lower Yangtze delta near a branch of the Grand Canal, had suddenly erupted with fetid, fluorescent green toxic cynobacteria—pond scum—depriving more than 2 million local residents of potable drinking and cooking water.
The pollution outbreak at Lake Tai had been building for decades as irrigation and flood works reduced the lake’s circulation of cleansing, oxygenating freshwater. From the 1980s, some 2,800 chemical plants also proliferated along the transport canals around the lake, which provided both the large volumes of water they needed for processing and discharge and for shipping the end products to the industrial port of Shanghai downstream. Local officials had encouraged the chemical plants to locate around the lake because their taxes provided four-fifths of local government revenue. Although reports of the extensive pollution they were causing had reached China’s top leaders as early as 2001, local political resistance and chemical company cover-ups had kept the national inspectors at bay. A lone, dogged private environmental whistle-blower lost his job and in 2006, after further agitation, was arrested on dubious charges. He was still in prison—and became an instant national hero—when the toxic combination of chemical waste, untreated sewage, fertilizer runoff, and lack of rainfall finally exploded in the lake with oxygen-choking cynobacteria bloom. Within six months the central government enacted antipollution measures and promised to restore China’s major lakes to their original pristine states by 2030.
By the early twenty-first century, pollution has reached epidemic proportions throughout China, and is seriously exacerbating the nation’s natural water shortages. Over half the freshwater in the nation’s major river systems and lakes, and a third of its groundwater, is unfit for human consumption. Two in three major cities suffer serious water shortages. Only one-fifth of wastewater is treated compared to about four-fifths in first world nations. Electricity generation at power plants is sometimes curtailed for want of adequate river volumes, which likewise forces temporary factory production halts at big water users like petrochemical plants, smelters, and paper mills. To keep up with demand, reliance on groundwater has doubled since 1970 to constitute one-fifth of the national supply. By the government’s own admission, one-third of its land is severely degraded due to water loss, soil erosion, salinization, and desertification. In 2007, the World Bank concluded that some 750,000 Chinese were dying prematurely each year from the nation’s water and air pollution, but acceded to Chinese official requests to excise that finding from the final report for fear that it might stir domestic unrest.
Upon ascending to power after 2000, in fact, China’s post-Tiananmen leadership has tried to nudge the country’s economic system toward a more environmentally sustainable path. One public initiative, launched in 2004 by President Hu Jintao, attempted to modify China’s obsessive growth culture with a new Green GDP calculation that imputed the negative growth costs of environmental degradation in each province. Hu’s Green GDP report, however, was issued just once. It met strong political resistance from provincial leaders, who had been empowered under the 1978 reforms and who resented both the conclusions that much of their province’s celebrated economic achievement was being canceled by environmental damage and being called to account by central party leaders. Green GDP calculations continued to be made by others, however. The World Bank found that nea
rly 6 percent—over half—of China’s national GDP growth should be canceled from air and water pollution damages to sustainable ecosystems and human health. The deputy minister of China’s own, weak state environmental protection agency went further. He estimated the annual cost of environmental loss at 8 to 13 percent of GDP—negating all China’s vaunted economic growth.
China’s environmental challenge is reminiscent of the unsanitary, overcrowded conditions that hallmarked Britain’s cities in the early Industrial Revolution—writ immensely larger and intensified by modern-scale technologies and much more concentrated, rapid development. Somewhere between 2025 and 2035, the clean freshwater may run out in its water-famished north and its promise to clean up its polluted lakes and rivers will fall due to a public that is increasingly restive about environmental hazards. China’s conundrum is that it can ill afford to disappoint the soaring material expectations of its 1.5 billion citizens with remedies that might significantly hamper its dazzling economic growth; but its long-term growth may become unsustainable—and possibly suffer an abrupt, destabilizing environmental shock—if it doesn’t move fast enough to reverse the systematic overexploitation of its freshwater resources. Its governing dictum thus far remains frozen: Growth first, clean up later.
As the failure of the Green GDP initiative illustrated, changing an entrenched political economic culture is difficult, even for authoritarian China. In the absence of a clear and present emergency, Chinese leaders are mainly sticking to traditional, Confucian approaches that have prevailed since the Han era. Although incremental new pollution regulations and reforestation programs have been issued, only modest steps have been made to encourage more efficient use of existing water supply through pricing that more fully reflects its total cost. As a result, even in the face of widespread scarcity, the price of water in cities, industries and agriculture continues to be closely politically controlled and heavily subsidized. Chinese farmers consequently are still irrigating water-guzzling crops in dry regions in competition with cities and factories that treat and recycle far less water than is common in the West.
Chinese industry generally uses three to 10 times more water than its counterparts in the West—a significant, long-term competitive disadvantage in the global marketplace when the subsidies or the water itself give out. Clean freshwater shortages also impose a ceiling on China’s future competitiveness in water-intensive, high-tech industries such as biotechnology, semiconductors, and pharmaceuticals. Other hidden competitive disadvantages stem from the interdependencies between water, energy, and food: China’s heavy reliance on coal-based ammonia production for its fertilizer and textiles manufacturing, for instance, consumes 42 times more water than the West’s cleaner natural-gas-based ammonia production methods. Inefficient flood irrigation and heavy artificial fertilizer use, moreover, continue to pauperize soils, and add to the pollution loads diminishing China’s long-term ability to feed itself.
Notwithstanding their warning of possible environmental catastrophe at Three Gorges, China’s leaders show no sign of wavering from their tenacious determination to harness and conquer nature through many more giant infrastructure-based water schemes in active fault zones. In addition to the country’s master growth plan of a dozen more hydropower bases on the upper Yangtze, China is launching immense dams on the upper basins of the Mekong and the Salween that have the potential to divert and pollute those great rivers before they exit China to bring life to the Asian nations founded around their middle and lower reaches.
Not just China’s own Yellow and Yangtze, but most of the great rivers of Asia originate in the Tibetan Plateau. Indeed, China’s aggressive international stance toward its domination of Tibet is as much about pragmatic control of its own and Asia’s regional water resources as it is about nationalist politics. Given the vital importance of those rivers to water-stressed societies downstream, it is troubling that China stands uncooperatively apart—as it generally does on any international agreement that might possibly constrain its freedom to pursue its overriding national growth goals—from all but two other countries in the world in voting against the 1997 U.N. Watercourses Convention recognizing the need to fairly share international waterways in ways that don’t significantly harm other river states and are equitably shared among them.
Yet all China’s grandest hydraulic plans are dwarfed in scale and ambition by its heroic South-to-North Water Diversion Project. The inspirational spirit, once again, had been Mao Zedong, who during his 1952 inspection of China’s water resources, noted: “Southern China has too much water and the north has too little. We should try to borrow some from the south to help the north.” With water famine looming in the north and desirous of making the 2008 Beijing Olympics an international showcase for the new China, Chinese leaders in 2001 launched the transnational civil engineering water transfer scheme of uncertain technical feasibility and environmental side effects to redirect rivers of water—two and a half to three times the volume of the Colorado River or 25 times more than Libya’s subterranean Manmade River—northward from the Yangtze basin. Three separate channels, totaling 2,200 miles in length, were designed to carry the water across mountains, canyons, waterways, railways, and other arduous natural and man-made landscapes, to deliver parched north China from its dire thirst.
Work on the eastern and central routes began on an accelerated timetable to be ready to deliver water for the Olympics; the more complex, western project is programmed to start after 2010. The eastern route diverts water from the mouth of the Yangtze and, with the help of 13 pumping stations, lifts it to channels that carry it along the coast through the north China plain and on to the cities Tianjin and Beijing. Large sections run through still-functioning portions of the Grand Canal. The central route is to enlarge the huge artificial reservoir on the Han River, a main tributary of the Yangtze, and build a new 200-foot-wide water canal and aqueduct the length of France across the heavily populated north China plain toward Beijing and Tianjin. Supplemented by water from a Yangtze aqueduct near the Three Gorges Dam, it is designed to travel by tunnel under the Yellow River, cross 500 roads and 120 railway lines, and displace a quarter million people in its building. The goal is to relieve pressure on the Yellow by supplying water to the thirsty regions around it. The final western route is envisioned to reroute water from the Yangtze headwaters in the glacial, Tibetan plateau directly into the Yellow River—the only one of the three routes to replenish the Yellow River directly.
The doubts of environmentalists and water engineers about world history’s largest water transfer project were brushed aside in the urgency to deliver water to the north. The main worry about the eastern route has been that it might simply spread the extreme pollution from the Grand Canal and contaminate regional river basins. Following the great flood of 1855, large stretches of the Grand Canal had been left in a state of disrepair and left dry. The hundreds of miles still in use, which transported over 100,000 cargo ships annually, had become a filthy, malodorous, lifeless, black-colored cesspool of factory effluent and urban sewage; even touching its waters was treacherous to one’s health. The diversion project requires building hundreds of new sewage treatment plants, closing the endless rows of dirty factories along its banks, massive dredging, and other major cleanups.
Along the central route, a chief concern has been that taking too much water from the Han tributary would upset the region’s ecological balance and worsen pollution farther downstream. Pumping water across the mountains from the Three Gorges Dam would, in turn, lower that dam’s hydroelectric output by at least 6 percent. The western route would be by far the most technically challenging, having to cut through mountains and gorges through tunnels up to 65 miles long in an earthquake-prone zone.
The South-to-North Water Diversion scheme is China’s most ambitious hydraulic undertaking to harness and conquer nature since the Grand Canal itself. Like the Grand Canal, it represents a potential new landmark chapter in water and world history—the opening of a new
era of nationwide plumbing networks that consolidate all accessible surface and ground water into a single supply that, if successful, likely will be imitated by other water-distressed nations. Such long-distance, gigantic-scale water-moving approaches are increasingly disfavored in the United States and other industrialized, liberal democracies as environmental anathemas whose benefits can be provided with fewer negative side effects in more ecosystem-sustainable ways. Critics often liken it to the Soviet Union’s disastrous alteration of the Aral Sea and regional climate from its replumbing of central Asia.
On one level, the international debate over water management is a recasting of the ancient Chinese Taoist-Confucian philosophical argument over the degree to which man should bend to the natural order to live in modest harmony with it or strive to command and harness it artificially to his will. In modern parlance, the debate is framed in terms of soft-path versus hard-path solutions. Tao-like soft-path advocates, who have been gaining influence internationally with the spread of the environmentalist movement, emphasize improved efficiencies from existing water supplies and “right-scaled” solutions tailored to users’ needs that give preference to smaller, more decentralized technologies and administration, and operate in closer harmony with the flow of nature to achieve systemic environmental balances. Hard-path proponents, who have dominated engineering thinking for most of human history and reached their zenith of achievement in the twentieth-century age of dams, continue to favor technologies and centralized infrastructures that strive to remold Nature’s ecosystems and water resources on a grand scale. In the twenty-first century, China is the unapologetic, leading state representative of the hard path. Yet on a simpler, everyday level, the Chinese predilection for outsized waterworks projects simply reflects the nation’s desperate thirst with few viable short-term alternatives.
Steven Solomon Page 50
