Remembering Those Who Spoke the Truth

Dai Qing

Keynote Speaker to the Symposium

What Have We Learned? After the Three Gorges Dam: A Post Project Assessment of the World’s Largest Hydro Dam

Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning University of California, Berkeley USA

April 13, 2013

PROBE INTERNATIONAL EDITOR: PATRICIA ADAMS 1

Dai Qing is a Probe International Fellow, activist and journalist who published Yangtze! Yangtze! in 1989, a book of essays and interviews with Chinese experts highlighting the concerns about the environmental and social effects of the Three Gorges Dam, followed by The River Dragon Has Come! in 1998. She has been honored with Fellowships from Harvard, Columbia, and the Australian National University, as well as the International PEN Award for Freedom, and the Goldman Environmental Prize.

Introduction

I want to express my thanks to Professors Philip Williams and Matt Kondolf, and to the University of California, Berkeley for organizing this symposium on this important topic and for inviting me to speak to this august gathering of scholars and friends.

The Three Gorges Dam is built, and what have we learned? I have reflected a lot on this question posed by the Symposium. I have especially reflected on it now because this month marks the 20th anniversary of the decision by China’s National People’s Congress to build the largest dam in the world.

What have we learned? There is little doubt that we have learned a great deal. The scholars gathered here will tell us what they have learned over the past 20 years about the consequences of building the Three Gorges Dam on China’s mother river.

Let me say how very grateful I am, on behalf of China, for their dedication to seeking the truth about the Three Gorges Project. Their knowledge will enlighten our policy analysis; their courage will inspire younger generations to take responsibility for our country and for the well-being of our fellow citizens.

We must also remember that an earlier generation of scholars – as principled and brave as the scholars today – warned us of the consequences of building the Three Gorges Dam.

Those Who Spoke Out Before

Some 24 years ago, in 1988, as the debate over the Three Gorges Project grew, 17 scientists, economists, sociologists, and open- minded Chinese Communist Party officials agreed to be interviewed by me and a team of journalists to give us their ideas and their independent opinions about this monumental project. Their insights, and their foresight, were published in Yangtze! Yangtze!.

With the exception of Li Rui, who we are so lucky to have heard from this morning, most of these scholars have died. I want to pay tribute to them for their valiant efforts to inform the debate about the Three Gorges Dam project.

The great scholars are many and I will not have time to list them all, though they all deserve to be recognized. I will describe just a few in order to answer the important question – After the Three Gorges Dam – What Have We Learned?

Let me start with Mr. Sun Yueqi (孙越崎). Mr. Sun was born in 1894 and died at the venerable age of 103 years, in 1997, the year the Yangtze River was cut off by the dam project.

In the mid-1980s, he led the delegation of Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) members to the dam site in order to evaluate the wisdom of building the Three Gorges Dam. This was an important delegation because it consisted of prestigious scientists and upright and open-minded high officials. During their site visit, they saw landslides with their own eyes and took careful note of the many complicated elements of the Three Gorges watershed. On their return to Beijing, they convened a meeting in order to explain why their views diverged from the prevailing view of the Ministry of Water Resource and Electricity, which favoured building the dam. They attempted to explain their reasons to policy makers and to the people of China in an open and informed debate. But the Beijing media, the mouthpiece of Communist Party of China, had received an order that they must not cover the CPPCC’s public lecture. I was the only journalist to attend.

Mr. Sun said in 1988, “Different opinions should be treated equally, and the debate should be allowed.”

He said, “Rushing to start the Three Gorges Project is nothing but malpractice for serious scientists. The price we will pay for poor decision-making will be extremely dear. If, once again, we make a decision in an undemocratic and unscientific manner, the laws of nature will mercilessly punish us and we will have to pay even more dearly.”

And then there was Professor Huang Wanli (黄万里), who was born in 1911 and passed away in 2001, in his 90th year, just as the officials who had promoted the Three Gorges Dam with impunity began to stir up a new and even more damaging mega-plan to build a cascade of dams on the upstream portion of the Yangtze, known as the Jinsha River.

Professor Huang was trained as a bridge engineer and graduated from Chiao Tung University in 1932. Then, when he started working as an engineer, China suffered a particularly large and damaging flood along the Yellow River. After that, in 1934 he was sent by the National Government to study in the United States where he earned his Master’s Degree in meteorology from Cornell University and then a PhD in hydrology from the University of Illinois.

Professor Huang always insisted that the scientific consequences of damming a river – today, these might be called the environmental consequences – should be evaluated before considering the engineering feasibility of a proposed dam. He opposed damming the Yellow River at Three Gate Gorges (Sanmenxia), and he opposed damming the Yangtze at Three Gorges. As a result, he was targeted in Mao’s political movements, most notably the th “rightist” movement and was forbidden to teach until, in his 87 year, he was “rehabilitated” and he was once again allowed to return to the classroom to impart his insights about China’s hydrology to his dedicated students. During the period of his “internal” exile, he sent letters to China’s top leaders asking for just 30 minutes to explain to them the danger of damming the Yangtze. No one listened to him.

1 Professor Huang said: “I am emphatic that the deposition reach of a river should never be dammed.

“The Three Gorges Project is on a deposition reach; it is on the golden waterway, as it is commonly called. This project would also involve the submergence of 500,000 mu of farmland and the resettlement of more than 1 million people – it should not be taken lightly. Never dam the Three Gorges.”

So too are we also grateful to Mr. Lu Qinkan (陆钦侃), who was born in 1913 and who passed away in his 98th year in 2011. Indeed, it was in this year that the dam authority began to acknowledge the serious negative problems with the project and the State Council issued a statement calling for those problems to be solved “urgently” with the creation of the “Three Gorges Post-Project Plan.”

Mr. Lu graduated from Zhejiang University in 1936 and was sent to the United States by the National Government to work with the Bureau of Reclamation, starting as an intern working with the Tennessee Valley Authority. While in the U.S., he earned a master’s degree from the University of Colorado. He was a true veteran working in the field of hydro-development in China and particularly on the Three Gorges Project in China. He told me, “The more I know about the project, the more I worry about it.”

Mr. Lu said: “Since I had done extensive research in this field, I believed the role of the Three Gorges reservoir in controlling floods would be very limited, and was overestimated in general.

1 Deposition reach – reach with net deposition. During high flows more sediment will be supplied to the reach from upstream and less sediment from the reach will be moved downstream. 5

And it could lead to a chain of fatal consequences for the economy, environment, society and political stability.

“If the project ever gets started, it will be impossible to stop it. Therefore, we should be very careful in making this decision.”

Mr. Hou Xueyu (侯学煜), a botanist, was born in 1912 and studied in the United States from 1945-1949, earning his Master’s and PhD degrees from the University of Pennsylvania. He passed away in 1991, the year that the Three Gorges Project promoters pushed the project with all their effort and shouted their slogan, “the sooner the better.” To give you an idea of just how much this project was being promoted, in 1991, Chen Muhua (陈慕华), the vice chairman of the National People’s Congress led a delegation of NPC standing committee members to three provinces associated with the project: Hubei, Hunan, Jiangxi. They inspected, and then suggested, that the State Council submit a design scheme for the Three Gorges Project to the National People’s Congress for deliberation and approval as soon as possible. Can you imagine another project being so powerful that it could muster this kind of special treatment in order to secure its approval?

Mr. Hou said, “In fact, I think the official feasibility study for the Three Gorges Project underestimates damage to the local environment and losses of natural resources. For several decades now, those engaged in hydro-electric power construction have emphasized the benefits of building hydro dams more than the disasters and problems caused by the dam projects, let alone consider their impact on the environment and natural resources in the reservoir area and even the river valley as a whole.”

Then there is the widely recognized Mr. Mao Yushi (茅于轼), born in 1929 and happily still with us on this Earth. Mr. Mao graduated from the Department of Mechanics, Chiao Tung University though, from the beginning of China’s new age of opening up and reform, he considered the social sciences to be more important in the modernization and transformation of this country. He founded the independent Beijing Institute of Economics and has recently won the 2012 Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty.

Mr. Mao said in 1988, “After taking a comprehensive view of the decision-making procedure for the Three Gorges Project, I gave up any hopes I had harboured about the outcome because the decision was based on how much power a few officials held.

“What responsibility did the hundreds of experts who were involved in preparing the feasibility study for the Three Gorges Project take? In fact, there were no standards for them to follow, no regulation of their work, and thus they were not held responsible for their analysis or conclusions.

“It is dangerous to make a final decision by relying on an assessment for which no one is responsible!”2

Li Rui (李锐) our opening speaker was born in 1916. He said, “As you know, the Three Gorges Project is listed by the World Commission on Dams as No.1 of “the world’s ten most dangerous dams.” He asked, “Is it true that no single Chinese policy-maker knew anything about how serious the problems with the Three Gorges (Project) would be? Up to the time of their deaths, Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai both knew it was not a trivial matter. Even Mao Zedong, who considered himself “to be absolutely lawless,”3 never mentioned the Three Gorges again to the end of his life.”

In 1989, a fierce debate in the National People’s Congress and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference4 broke out. The State Council resolved it by announcing that a decision to build the dam had been postponed for at least five years. This was in March of 1989, before the students began to gather in Tiananmen Square.

How did it come to pass that the project was approved in 1992 and started soon after? What was the reason? What happened in China to allow a reversal of the 1989 State Council decision?

Can I say that without the tumultuous events of the Tiananmen suppression there would have been no Three Gorges Project? These are the two legacies that Deng Xiaoping left for China, and the two debts he owes to the Chinese people.

2 “Must a finished project finish its environment? Yangtze! Yangtze! By Dai Qing, (English Edition), Earthscan Publications Limited, edited by Patricia Adams and John Thibodeau, Probe International 1994, pp 241-2. 3 “To be absolutely lawless” is a Chinese idiom meaning well above the law. 4 The CPPCC is, according to its website, “an organization of the united front with wide representation. It is an important organ of multi-party cooperation and political consultation under the leadership of the CPC. It is composed of the CPC, other political parties, mass organizations, and representative public personages from all walks of life, representatives of compatriots of Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao as well as of returned overseas Chinese and other specially invited people.”

Twenty-three years have passed since the dreadful night in Tiananmen Square, and 15 years have passed since the death of Deng. I must conclude today that it was a great double tragedy: shooting civilians and damming the Yangtze.

The post-project research, of the last 20 years, has proved the accuracy of the earlier scholarly warnings that the costs of building the Three Gorges Dam – the social, economic, geological, and environmental costs –would far outweigh the benefits.

If our country’s superb and principled scholars could have helped to inform and enlighten a civil debate about Three

Gorges Dam, if they could have held a symposium such as this one, which was open to the press and the public, so that their opinions could be challenged and rejected or accepted, would the Three Gorges Dam ever have been built? I don't think so.

But they were silenced. And their silence became absolute with the ill wind that swept China – the aftermath of the June 4 Incident. After June 4, those officials who favoured reforms and alternatives to Three Gorges were swept aside and replaced by those who ruthlessly brooked no dissent.

So the real lesson that we have learned in the last 20 years is that the decision to build the Three Gorges Dam was based not on scientific and economic truths, on the rights of citizens, or the rule of law, but on raw power. No amount of good information would have stopped this unaccountable political force.

Twenty years have passed since Sun Yueqi, Huang Wanli, Lu Qinkan, Hou Xueyu, and others spoke out on behalf of our dear Yangtze River. And for that, we must remember them with honour and appreciation.

Thank you.