As a Dam Closes, Chinese Tally Gain and Loss

June 9, 2003
By ERIK ECKHOLM

FENGJIE, China, June 7 - There's an odd calm along this part of the Yangtze, no jubilation and no weeping, as the tawny waters lap several feet higher each day and a 350-mile stretch of this mightiest of rivers is finally transformed into a long narrow lake.

After decades of bitter debate, years of heavy construction and the uprooting so far of 700,000 people, the Three Gorges Dam has closed its gates.

On June 15, the reservoir will be filled to its interim level of 135 meters, or 443 feet above sea level. The next day, the first commercial ships will pass through the locks, heralding the eventual passage of ocean vessels hundreds of miles upstream to Chongqing, a booming
metropolis in central China.

In August, two initial turbines from what will be the world's most colossal array of generators are to start spinning electricity - a down payment on the promised riches from a $25 billion megaproject with gains and perils that may be forever disputed.

"For the country as a whole, this project might be worthwhile," said Yang Hongwen, who runs an ailing small business in Fengjie, a city some 150 miles upstream of the dam.

"But from the perspective of the ordinary people around here, it was a mistake," he said, surveying what had been the lower half of a lively town of 100,000 and now resembles ground zero of an atomic blast, flattened for service as the lake bed and teems with people slaving to
scavenge every ounce of steel.

Many of those resettled up to now - another 430,000 or more people must be moved from the area before the project is completed in 2009 - are already hurting for good land or jobs. For some longtime residents like Mr. Yang, nostalgia runs deep for the lost ancient city and the nearby scenic gorges that will soon be a little less deep and majestic.

But not everyone is unhappy. In a pattern repeated throughout China in this age of ebullient construction, the quick and the connected are making out fine, while the slow, the poor and the aged eat dust.

A few miles up river from the old town, a bright, new, high-rise Fengjie has sprung up in a miraculous six years. It is already home to 80,000 people and starting to bustle with characteristic Sichuanese color and cheer. Throughout the region, some enterprising types have made fortunes off the billions being spent on new towns, highways and bridges.

Worried most about their own livelihoods, few people here share Mr. Yang's concerns for the loss of scenery or cultural relics or the effects on the environment downstream, and few have thought about the pollution that many experts now see as the biggest headache for the project. Already, with the river waters stilled for little more than a week, a jump has been registered in E. coli, the bacterial marker of sewage contamination.

The closing of the dam on June 1 was a key turning point in a project that, by 2009, will see the lake surface raised by yet another 130 feet, flooding huge additional areas of town and country.

A visionary project long ago extolled long ago by Mao Zedong himself, the dam has come to symbolize the Chinese Communist Party's drive to conquer nature, and it is still touted as the mark of a great nation's arrival.

Any grandeur is hard to find in the fractured old town of Fengjie. A half-mile-wide swath of what had been a dense, decrepit, but happy warren of homes and markets and small factories has been blasted to rubble.

Here, the giant engineering project has produced a scene out of the 19th century. Hundreds of men and women pound away at the tangled sea of concrete with picks and sledgehammers and bare hands, salvaging steel rods and bricks to earn perhaps $25 for a month of work.

Li Shinli, 51, heaved his pick under a slab of concrete that hung dangerously above him but was tantalizingly replete with steel rods.

"I'm trying to save up some money so my son can go to college," said Mr. Li, who like many of the rock-pile workers was from a nearby village where he earns little from growing grain.

"Yes this is dangerous," he said, waving to the hovering slab, "but we can't do anything about that." "The people in my village don't really have any strong feelings about the dam," he said. "But at least it has given us a chance to earn a little money."

Shopkeepers and remaining residents on the ragged new edge of the dying town, laggards who will mostly have to move in the next year or two, grumble about stingy relocation funds
and corruption.

"We've lived here for 20 years and this is our home," said Li Changshu, a woman in her late 50's who runs a small herb shop just yards from the edge of the rubble. By this week, she was more resigned than angry.

Because she and her husband never did obtain official classification as urban residents, she said, they have not been given an apartment or shop in the new city, as more fortunate Fengjie residents were. Now they wait for the paltrier compensation being offered to farmers and wonder, she said, where they will end up.

"There are lots of people here in this position," said Mrs. Li, who added with a chuckle that over the years she has sold aphrodisiacs from this now-condemned spot to all kinds of characters, police chiefs and criminals alike.

Like megaprojects anywhere, this one has been dogged by controversy and its true costs and benefits are as murky as the silt-laden Yangtze waters.

The benefits to shipping seem clear enough, though some worry about a potentially disastrous build-up of silt at the reservoir head near Chongqing.

As the world's largest hydroelectric project, if all goes to plan, the dam will support China's development and replace dozens of large coal or nuclear plants, an environmental plus.

The 1.4-mile wide dam, promoters long claimed, will tame the floods that have devastated the Yangtze basin for millennia. Hydrologists now say it will prevent some floods but that others, such as the most recent disastrous surge in 1998, may be little affected because they rise from swollen tributaries downstream of the dam.

The famed Three Gorges, honored through the centuries by painters and poets, will be diminished but still an attraction. Hundreds of tourist ships, now docked because of SARS fears, expect to ply the new lake.

Perhaps the greater cultural loss will be the archaeological sites, graves and temples that are being inundated. Some of the most prominent temples and relics have been moved, but countless more, including those never excavated, will be lost for good.

One of the chief sites, the White Emperor Temple, is on a hilltop near Fengjie, at the entrance to the famed gorges.

Its main buildings lie just above the water line projected for 2009, but some lower buildings have already had to be demolished. A cave that had contained an important Buddhist
sculpture has been cemented over, the figurine cut off the rock and moved.

"The temples and relics aren't a problem because they are being taken to high ground," said Pu Dongping, a 40-year-old rural woman who was overseeing construction of a huge retaining wall on the hillside below the temple.

Eighteen years ago, as early construction began, her husband parlayed his building skills into contracts that have gradually become larger and more complex. "We were just ordinary farmers, but we've gotten rich from the Three Gorges project," she said.

Within the last several years, as it became clear that the dam would actually be built, scientists have raised grave concerns about the industrial poisons, farm chemicals and sewage that have long poured into the Yangtze and out to the sea.

The government has belatedly scrambled to curb pollution and has plans for at least 19 new sewage treatment plants along the upper Yangtze, mainly in larger cities, but most are not yet complete, said Lei Xiongshu, a retired engineering professor, former national legislator and
longtime skeptic about the dam.

"It's not enough just to have treatment plants," he said in a telephone interview. "You need to insure that all industrial and domestic waste, including sewage, is diverted to them for proper treatment, and we're a long way from that."

Already, he said, worrisome levels of E. coli bacteria have been registered in water backing up from the dam, which may render the lake water undrinkable.

But so far, the most nettlesome problem has been the resettlement of hundreds of thousands in a region of steep, overexploited land and a country with little empty arable areas.

According to official estimates, close to 700,000 people have already been moved, some to new and existing cities, some to farming areas and some to distant provinces. By 2009, officials say, the number must reach 1.13 million, including many people like Mrs. Li, in Fengjie, who have no obvious place to go.