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Opening Address Li Rui April 13, 2012 AFTER Opening Address By Li Rui Former Vice Minister for Water Resources and Electric Power People's Republic of China Translated by Probe International April 13, 2012 AFTER THREE GORGES DAM –WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED? A POST PROJECT ASSESSMENT ON THE WORLD'S LARGEST HYDRO DAM April 13th and 14th 2012 150 WURSTER HALL University of California, Berkeley Twenty years ago this month, two-thirds of the delegates voted in favour of the Three Gorges Dam project in China's National People's Congress (nearly one-third of the total, or 866 delegates voted against or abstained from voting). The Communist Party’s propaganda machine and the media cheered the decision and said this project would create more than a hundred of the "world's firsts:" In overall scale, installed capacity, technical sophistication, and so on and so forth, this dam would surpass all others. And, they predicted, this hydropower project would be good for mankind, bring enormous benefits to future generations of Chinese citizens, and rejuvenate China as a nation. In the 1950s, when I served as head of the Hydropower Construction Bureau of the Chinese Ministry of Electric Power, Lin Yishan, director of the Yangtze Valley Planning Office1, published a long article in the journal China Water, proposing that the Three Gorges Dam be constructed in order to solve the problem of flooding on the Yangtze River. Lin Yishan proposed that the dam be built to have a Normal Pool Level (NPL) of 235 meters, which would have flooded Chongqing. I immediately wrote an article opposing this proposal, and the journal Hydroelectric Power went so far as to publish a special issue to refute Lin Yishan's proposal. But Lin Yishan successfully persuaded Mao Zedong, who then composed his now famous poem entitled "Swimming" in which he depicted a scene of “high mountains and deep gorges that would be transformed into a peaceful lake.” The People's Daily gave the poem and the proposal a great deal of publicity. Under the circumstances, therefore, it was impossible for the newspapers to publish my articles opposing the proposal. So on April 14, 1957, I published a small essay entitled "Large net doctrine" in the People's Daily, trying to voice my different opinion using irony.2 Probe International 225 Brunswick Avenue, Toronto, ON, Canada M5S 2M6 Tel: (416) 964-9223 Fax: (416) 964-8239 www.probeinternational.org The Communist Party of China's Central Committee meeting, held in January 1958 in Nanning (the capital of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region), marked the start of the "Great Leap Forward." As the last topic for discussion, Mao Zedong put forward the proposal to build the Three Gorges project. Somebody had told Mao Zedong that Li Rui was a person who is strongly opposed to the project, so Mao invited me and Lin Yishan to present our opinions. Thus, Lin Yishan and I debated in court, in front of Mao Zedong. We then followed up, after the face-to-face debate, by writing long articles for Mao. (In his article, Lin Yishan changed his proposed NPL to 200 meters). Finally, I achieved a victory over Lin Yishan because Mao Zedong favoured my views, and rejected Lin’s arguments. Later, in the 1970s, when Lin Yishan and others tried once again to launch the plan to build the Three Gorges Dam, Mao Zedong rejected it again. It is clear that, at that time, Mao Zedong was clear-headed on this issue. In early 1979, after spending twenty years in prison and internal political exile, I returned to Beijing and resumed my post as vice minister of the Ministry of Water Resources and Electric Power. Chen Yun warned me that some people were agitating to build the Three Gorges Dam once again, so urged me to submit my own views to the Central Committee (of the CPC). In the same year, the State Council sent a delegation to the United States for a study tour with a focus on energy. As a member of that group, I met the commander of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which built a number of hydropower projects in the United States. In 1980, I invited the commander who led a U.S. delegation group to visit China. After an inspection tour of the Three Gorges area on the Yangtze River, we held a conference in Beijing. Both American engineers and officials from central departments attended the conference, including Jiang Zemin, at the time, the last deputy director of the State Import and Export Board. At the conference, engineers from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers made their views clear: with such favorable conditions for navigation on the Yangtze, the world's fourth largest river, no dam should be built. Doing so would seriously impact shipping on the Yangtze River. To this day, I still keep a photo of that conference. In addition to Lin Yishan, Qian Zhengying, minister of the Ministry of Water Resources and Electric Power, also actively lobbied to build the Three Gorges Dam project. In the mid-1980s, the State Planning Commission and Science and Technology Commission were originally in charge of the feasibility study for the Three Gorges project, but Qian Zhengying tried everything to replace them so she could take over the evaluation instead. She succeeded after Zhao Ziyang stepped down. After that, the job of carrying out the feasibility study was divided into 14 groups such as flood control, power generation, shipping, geology, resettlement and so forth, with each group headed by one of her subordinates. As a result, the completed feasibility study approved the dam easily, though nine experts (including Lu Qinkan, Cheng Xuemin, and so on) still resolutely opposed the project and some even refused to sign their names to the feasibility study. Probe International 225 Brunswick Avenue, Toronto, ON, Canada M5S 2M6 Tel: (416) 964-9223 Fax: (416) 964-8239 www.probeinternational.org In 1985, the Hunan Press of Science and Technology published my book On the Three Gorges Project, with 20 articles and letters that had been submitted to the central government, roughly about 150,000 words, all of which opposed construction of the Three Gorges project. In China at that time of the early 1980s, people needed special courage to express their opinions about the dam project if their opinion differed from the Party's position. Despite these circumstances, a number of people who were not in favour of the dam project expressed their opinions, including Sun Yueqi, Zhou Peiyuan, and Huang Wanli (an outstanding water expert who was labeled a "rightist" in 1957). They voiced their concerns to top leaders about problems with the dam project such as sediment deposition, obstruction of navigation by the shiplocks, the huge number of migrants, the environmental capacity, the collapse of mountainsides, geological disasters, and so on, and so forth. They also recommended that not building the Three Gorges project is better than building it, and it is better to build it later rather than sooner. Professor Huang Wanli, one of the most determined opponents, once said to me that if the Three Gorges dam is built and something goes wrong with the project, three cast iron statues should be erected in Baidicheng City like those at the Yuewang Temple,3 with Qian Zhengying in the middle and Li Peng and Zhang Guangdou on either side, kneeling in apology to the Yangtze River. Actually, Deng Xiaoping was the person who made the final decision on the construction of the Three Gorges project. When touring the Three Gorges in July 1980, he was particularly interested in one thing Wei Tingzheng, head of the Changjiang Water Resources Commission, the pupil and successor of Lin Yishan, said: "After completion of the Three Gorges project, a 10,000 tonne vessel will be able to reach Chongqing." (In fact, only a 5,000-tonne vessel can sail under the Nanjing Yangtze Bridge in the lower reaches and Wuhan Yangtze Bridge in middle reaches of the Yangtze, so “a 10,000 tonne vessel” was later changed to "a 10,000 tonne fleet.") This was how China's political system worked: the supreme leader had the final say on a major issue. In 1993, one year after the approval of the Three Gorges project, I continued to write to top leaders, suggesting they stop construction of the Three Gorges Dam project and continue the discussion. There were precedents. For example, both the Gezhouba and Danjiangkou projects were suspended (halted for a while though resumed later). Subsequently, however, Premier Zhu Rongji called me to say that Jiang Zemin, General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, asked that I take the interests of the whole into account.4 Taking responsibility to record history, I revised and expanded my book, On the Three Gorges Project. With a total of 450,000 words, the book was published in Hong Kong in 19985. Several of my words can be found in the back cover of the book: "I have two goals in publishing this book: First, to help the world understand the history of the Three Gorges project controversy; and, second, to help the country make wise decisions on major projects, and on a scientific and democratic basis. As for the Three Gorges Probe International 225 Brunswick Avenue, Toronto, ON, Canada M5S 2M6 Tel: (416) 964-9223 Fax: (416) 964-8239 www.probeinternational.org project itself, especially after decades of debates until the day it was finally approved and launched, I have to say, I have repeatedly said what I should say, so enough is enough. Heaven and man should know my innermost heart.
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