The Three Gorges Dam (#130, Topic I)

Today marks the completion of the Three Gorges dam -- a dream of Sun Yat-sen (George Washington's counterpart in China) ever since 1918. Of particular interest, though I saw no mention of in the western press, is that the design of this hydroelectric-cum-flood-control facility, the world's largest, was done entirely by Chinese engineers. All the western press (such as the Washington Post and the Economist) talks about is the number of residents being resettled; their stories were pitched as if the government never gave this matter the careful thought it deserves. Wrong. This attempt at misinformation is unworthy. Quite a few years ago, my wife and I were on a Three Gorges cruise, which made several stops at sites that would be submerged upon the dam's completion; we learned the care the government exercised, and the phased-in approach it took -- residents were suitably compensated and given options as to when and where to move. Indeed, the World Bank was, at one time, involved in the financing of this project; this matter was raised and apparently answered to the WB's satisfaction. Come to think of it, how can there be progress without change? The Yantze river had tormented China for over five millennia, killing many million people and displacing perhaps hundreds of millions in the process. (A 1931 flood killed 145,000; another one in 1935 killed 142,000.) With the dam, slightly over a million need be relocated. So what. Compared to cumulative damages in the past, this one-time human cost can easily survive the severest cost-benefit analysis. In reality, the west's concern is with the dam's substantial contribution to China's energy needs, generating some 85 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity by 2008 -- 20+ times than that generated by the Hoover Dam (4 billion kilowatt-hours) on the Nevada-Arizona border. Early on, I had visited both the Itaipu Dam (the world's largest before the Three Gorges Dam came along) and the Hoover Dam; I could not recall reading anything, both on-site and off-site, about the resettlements that were inescably needed in these projects. Why not? Why impose a double standard to this Chinese project?