When a Billion Chinese Jump

for the first time in seven years.

“I have to see if my mother is OK. It looks as though everything was flattened,” he said with impressive equanimity. “I don’t know if my home will still be there. I want to see for myself.”

Wang was part of the floating population of migrants that have built modern China. Estimated at between 100 and 200 million, this vast population of itinerant workers had provided the human fuel for the country’s economic engine. They were a flood unleashed.

During the Mao era, migration was tightly restricted. Without permission, it was very difficult for people to leave the area of their hukou (family registration). But after the economic reforms of the late 1970s, controls were relaxed, allowing a huge pool of cheap rural labor to move to factory production lines and city construction sites. The spectacular economic development that followed is largely attributable to the opening of the migration floodgates.

But the surge of people away from their homes had brought with it a sense of restlessness, uncertainty, and social unease. This was particularly true when the relocation was forced, as was often the case for major construction projects, especially dams.²⁰ As familiar buildings were reduced to rubble, as neighbors moved on and values seemed to become as fluid as the waters of the Yangtze, early twenty-first-century China was a country where it was possible to feel lost simply by standing still.

Mutability inspired some of the best contemporary art and film in China. The most evocative was Still Life, a film about the Yangtze, released in 2005 by the director Jia Zhangke. At once stunningly beautiful and disturbingly bleak, it told the story of a Sichuanese migrant who, like Wang, returned after ten years to search for a family in a town reduced to rubble and soon to be swallowed by the elements. In this case it was not an earthquake that transformed the landscape, but demolition teams and the Three Gorges Dam. The scenes of devastation, however, were remarkably similar.

Close to 1.4 million people were relocated for the Three Gorges Dam, the most ambitious and controversial hydroelectric development ever undertaken. It took fifty years to plan, fifteen years to build, $24 billion to pay for, and 16 million tons of reinforced concrete to fill. The giant barrier has created a reservoir that stretches back along the Yangtze almost the length of England.²¹ This mass of water drives twenty-six giant turbines to generate up to 18,000 megawatt-hours of electricity. There are few more fitting monuments to early twenty-first- century China.

Even more than Zipingpu, the Three Gorges Dam was driven forward over massive political opposition and scientific doubt. Three generations of strongmen pushed it through: Sun Yat-sen approved a plan for the dam in 1919 as a defense against floods; Mao Zedong took the idea a step further in the 1950s, when he commissioned Russian engineers to draw up blueprints; but construction could not begin until 1992 when the premier, Li Peng, forced the plan through despite unusually vocal domestic opposition.²² As with Zipingpu, the rebalancing of people and water along the biggest river in China triggered far deeper social and environmental disturbance than anticipated.

I too failed to grasp the consequences the first time I traversed the chocolate brown waters of the Yangtze. It was 2003. The Three Gorges Dam was not yet finished, but I was upbeat. For an energy-hungry nation, the dam seemed a clean alternative to thirty conventional power stations. It would also reduce the risks of the deadly floods that killed thousands and ravaged croplands every few years.

At the time, I was, like many new arrivals, impressed to find a nation that was far more open, modern, and forward-thinking than I had believed before visiting. Outside China the dam was a symbol of the communist government’s poor record on human rights and the environment. About 1.4 million people been forced from their homes by the rising waters, which inundated precious ecosystems, heritage sites, and some of the most stunning scenery on the planet, but I wanted to see if there was another side of the story.

I took a boat called the China Universe. Despite its grand name, the closest this scruffy multitiered tourist vessel came to the stars or the state was a hiccuping karaoke machine filled with patriotic songs about the Yangtze. Dirty water sloshed around on the floor of the cabin, and the galley was so dank that I was sick for a week afterward.

Up on deck, however, the view of the gorges lived up to the poems and legends. Imposingly steep and narrow at the water’s edge, the slopes rose up hundreds of feet to fantastically shaped crags that seemed to sharpen against the sky as the sun set.

It was dark by the time we reached Xiling, the last of the Three Gorges. I went to the bridge, where the captain’s face was illuminated by the sonar screen needed to negotiate this notoriously treacherous stretch of river. Crewmen illuminated the slopes on either side with searchlights that seemed to draw the jagged sides of the gorge nearer and make the river darker.

We hit the dam soon after. In the depths of the night, it was an awe-inspiring sight. Miles and miles of vast, silent darkness suddenly gave way to an enormous, noisy, frenetic building site. Everything was illuminated: the massive locks with orange fairground lights, the construction rigs with strings of colored lights, and the ground with the headlamps of cranes and tractors. The effect was that of a Spielberg science-fiction epic.

As the China Universe waited for its turn in the lock, I alighted with the other passengers to wander the site. Our guide declared the dam a “miracle for the whole world,” and briefly, I almost believed it. Watching from a viewing gallery as thousands of tons of water thundered out from turbines the size of cliff faces and churned up the river far below, I was soaked, deafened, and awestruck. This was power, raw power. Mighty but tamed. A placid reservoir above, a seething torrent below. Humanity stood between the two, controlling, directing, milking the elements.

If there was ever a moment when I was ready to embrace the man-made glory of the new China, it was then. The developed world had asked the country to reduce greenhouse gases, and here was a massive alternative to carbon-fueled power. Westerners complained about mining accidents and air pollution from coal, and now here was a hydropower plant that generated the energy equivalent of 50 million tons of coal each year. Why, I wondered, were these benefits so rarely talked about overseas? If the dam had been designed by a modern-day Isambard Kingdom Brunel, rather than Chinese communists, wouldn’t we be celebrating it as a work of genius?

But like so many aspects of China’s brave new world, the dam looked very different in the cold light of the following day, when it resembled a gray scar on an otherwise stunning landscape.

Just how big an eyesore was apparent at the exhibition center, where the flood of superlatives from the guides were part boast, part self-indictment. The dam, they said, was not just the biggest hydropower plant in the world, it also contained more concrete and steel than any other structure, and necessitated the biggest resettlement program in engineering history. The guide insisted the relocations were a success and the environmental challenges were being overcome. But there was something missing from the official endorsement of the dam. On the walls were photographs of state leaders visiting the site and congratulating the engineers on their work. But there was no picture of Hu Jintao.

Neither he nor Premier Wen Jiabao, a trained geologist, attended the dam’s completion ceremony in 2006. This raised suspicions that President Water and Premier Earth were distancing themselves from a project that was quickly proving a disaster for the river and the land.

As the water rose, the weight of the reservoir began triggering landslides and deadly waves.²³ Such was the concern that the government had to postpone plans to raise the level of the reservoir to its maximum height.²⁴ The water quality deteriorated as the river became less able to flush garbage and algae out of its system. Domestic newspapers said the pollution was “cancerous” and a threat to marine life and drinking supplies in 186 cities. The state news agency Xinhua warned that the Three Gorges could become an “environmental catastrophe” unless remedial action was taken. Alarm bells rang even louder when the State Council’s point man on the project, Wang Xiaofeng, spoke of “hidden dangers” that could cause pollution, landslides, and “other geological disasters.”²⁵

This represented a volte-face by the establishment. Until then, such grim warnings had come only from academia and the NGO sector. Historically, the government’s usual response to pollution and disaster was to cover up bad news and arrest the critics.

No one knew that better than Dai Qing, one of China’s most indomitable environmentalists, who was imprisoned for ten months after publishing a searing criticism of the Three Gorges Dam in 1989. After her release, she continued to be an influential critic of the government’s water-management policies and won the Goldman Environmental Prize in 1993.²⁶

Dai told me China had a long history of building dangerous dams and then covering up the consequences.