When a Billion Chinese Jump

inland regions such as Tibet, the government encouraged college graduates to take jobs in target regions by refunding their tuition fees.³⁶ This was part of an influx that affected the environmental and social order. A major cause of the deadly ethnic riots in Lhasa of 2008 was anger among the local population at Han and Hui migrants who dominated business in the center of the city.

Beijing’s politburo of engineers would never accept a challenge to their control over Tibet. The strategic value of this highest of high ground was simply too great. The unrest was quelled. Government spokesmen accused the Dalai Lama of being “a wolf in monk’s clothing.” The colonization of the mountains was once again portrayed in the state media as a benevolent act of development. I recalled Younghusband, who also believed he was bringing civilization to Tibet by making its resources exploitable. He left Lhasa “boiling over with love for the whole world” just weeks after ordering the slaughter of any Tibetan who stood in his way.³⁷ The Chinese government was less murderous but more effective in exercising control in the name of progress.

In Tuotuohe, my head was pounding. The altitude was taking its toll. I had thrown up once. A bag of oxygen offered only temporary respite. Ahead was another vast barren plain, then the towering peaks of the Tanggula range, which marked the border with Tibet. The railway stretched forward, but for me it was the end of the line. Thinking back over what I had seen on the roof of the world, and what I had read of imperial and industrial history, I jotted down a line in my notebook: “In the nineteenth century, Britain taught the world how to produce. In the twentieth, the US taught us how to consume. If China is to lead the world in the twenty-first century, it must teach us how to sustain.”

But how could it do so when the foolish mountain movers prevailed over the useless-tree philosophers? Those who quested for power overcame even the wisest of those who were content to sustain.

Returning on the road we had come, our car passed a long convoy of military trucks heading toward Lhasa. The clouds, now dark and heavy with rain, sagged down almost to the plateau. A mass of brightly colored Tibetan prayer flags fluttered on the banks of a small river that would swell downstream to become the mighty Yangtze.

We passed over it on Mu’s concrete road beside Hu’s iron rail. Generations after Mao, the old chairman’s dream was being realized. Man was asserting its will over the mountains. As I was to learn farther downstream, the same was true of the rivers. Human ambition did not get much greater. Nor did the consequences.

3. Still Waters, Moving Earth Sichuan

Walls of stone will stand upstream to the West
To hold back Wushan’s clouds and rain
Till a smooth lake rises in the narrow gorges.
The mountain goddess if she is still there
Will be shocked at a world so changed.

—Mao Zedong, anticipating the Three Gorges Dam in his 1956 poem “Swim”

The cracked and shaken dam was safe. That was what the engineers said. But I could not help feeling a twinge of anxiety riding on the back of a motorbike toward the 156-meter-high slab of concrete that was holding back the Min River.

Four days had passed since China’s most devastating earthquake in more than thirty years struck just a short distance upstream, wobbling the earth, reshaping mountains, and tearing chunks off the dam’s concrete skin. The repair work continued. So did the aftershocks. As I drew closer, a cascade of water thundered through the floodgates above my head, covering me in a fine mist. Pressure from the reservoir on the other side of the barrier was being hastily released.

Half as tall again as the better-known barrier at the Three Gorges, Zipingpu was one of the newest and biggest of China’s 87,000 dams.¹ But it was not designed to withstand an almost direct hit by a magnitude 8 earthquake.²

Within seconds of that temblor, death and destruction rippled across an area the size of Belgium. More than ten million man-made structures came crashing down, landslides swallowed entire villages, 4 million people were instantly homeless, and tens of thousands of people were buried alive. The toll of dead and missing from that single minute of instability would eventually rise above 87,000.

In the chaotic aftermath of the quake, the government’s biggest concern was that a major dam might give way.³ Sichuan, a province of high mountains and mighty rivers next to the Tibetan Plateau, has more of these barriers than anywhere else in China.⁴ But Zipingpu was in a fear category of its own. Perched above the densely populated city of Dujiangyan, the dam was all that stood between 110 million cubic meters of water high in the mountains and 600,000 dwellers on the plains below. The juddering had opened fissures at the top of the dam, distorted the base, and put two floodways out of action. The state-run Xinhua News Agency described the cracks as “extremely dangerous.”⁵ If the dam collapsed, the death toll from the earthquake could easily multiply severalfold.

Thousands of soldiers were dispatched to the area.⁶ The vice minister of water resources flew in by helicopter to lead an emergency team charged with inspecting and repairing the dam. As they rushed to find out how much the quake had weakened the structure, the barrier was also tested by a rainstorm, which increased the volume of the reservoir and the pressure on the concrete wall. Fortunately, it held. The spillways were opened.⁷ As the water ebbed away so did the danger. That night, a relieved inspection team confirmed the barrier was stable. What they did not reveal is that the dam may have triggered the quake. This was to be the biggest scientific aftershock.

Zipingpu had been built on a fault line that had been still for millions of years, but seismic activity had increased after the reservoir went into operation. Each time it filled and emptied, more than 300 million tons of water rose and fell. It was like a giant jumping up and down on a cracked surface. Several leading scientists speculated that the result was a reservoir-induced earthquake. By stilling the water, they said, the engineers may have moved the land.

No nation on earth has gone as far as China in trying to stabilize its hydrology. For more than 2,000 years dams and dikes have been at the heart of the country’s politics and civilization. Under the principle of Tianming, or the “Mandate of Heaven,” emperors were judged by their ability to control the environment as well as the people. Earthquakes, floods, and droughts indicated that the world was out of balance and a change of rule imminent. To avoid rebellion, emperors knew they had to find harmony or at least impose order on chaos. Controlling the rivers was central to ruling the population.

Though the Mandate of Heaven was introduced at the start of the Zhou dynasty (1100 BC), the concept is far from dead. If anything, efforts to tame the torrents have been ramped up to new levels under a politburo dominated by former engineers. Billions of tons of concrete have been poured into the Yangtze, Yellow, Pearl, Liao, Songhua, Han, Huai, Jinsha, and Min rivers for hydroelectric and flood-control projects. The country’s waterways are now blocked by almost half of the world’s 45,000 biggest dams⁸ and many more smaller barriers for reservoirs, sediment control, and water diversion. China’s president, Hu Jintao, is a trained hydroengineer. His view of the world has been shaped by his knowledge of water and how it can be controlled. This approach and its consequences are most apparent in Sichuan, the vast southwestern province named after its waterways.⁹

The mightiest of them is the Yangtze, which, if its tributaries are included, accounts for 40 percent of the water volume in China and feeds a delta that produces 40 percent of the country’s economic output.

Zipingpu Dam sits on the Min, one of the Yangtze’s most spectacular tributaries. This 734-kilometer river