The Mighty Yangtze River & Three River Gorges Project

The longest river in China and the third longest in the world after the Nile and the Amazon, the Yangtze River has its source among the treeless mountains of Tanggula Ranges in Upper Qinghai. The river winds 6,300 kilometers (3,900 miles) through the country from west to east and earns the name Changjiang - simply, Long River in Chinese. The extensive river cuts through the heart of China marking the division of the country into north and south both geographically and culturally. It supports a third of the country's people and fertilizes its vast lands. Join us to discover its great humanity, culture and time-honored history.

Yangtze winds its way through the 10 provinces of Qinghai, Tibet, Yunnan, Sichuan, Hubei, Hunan, Jiangxi, Anhui, Jiangsu and Shanghai before disgorging its waters into the Yellow Sea. Its fertile alluvial plains produce great amounts of wheat, cotton, tobacco and silk. The Yangtze River can be divided into three parts:

The Upper Reaches begins from the source of Qinghai Province to Yichang in Hubei Province. It is the most attractive part of the river, with imposing mountain ranges, unbroken ravines, dangerous rapids and charming landscape. Along this 200-kilometer-long (130 miles) stretch, the river passes through the Three Gorges. In the Qutang Gorge, the river is only 100 meters wide with some 60 meters (200 feet) hydraulic gradient. In the Wu Gorge, mountains rise to a height of 500 to 1,000 meters (1,600 to 3,300 feet). In Xiling Gorge, China's largest engineering project - the Yangtze Three Gorge Dam is underway. Its purpose is to control disastrous flooding and provide enough hydroelectricity to power most of central and eastern China.

The Middle Reaches is from Yichang to Hukou at the mouth of Poyang Lake in Jiangxi Province, a distance of about 1,000 kilometers (620 miles). This region features flat lands with two large lakes, the Dongting and the Poyang that feed into the river.

The Lower Reaches is from Hukou to the estuary. The landscape in the river's lower course is typified by a flat delta plain, crisscrossed by canals and waterways. The region has been known for centuries as the 'Land of Fish and Rice'. Because of a port named Yangzi in ancient times, this stretch has given rise to another name "Yangtze" with which missionaries and colonialists adopted and as a result, became established in Europe as the name of the whole river.

The wet season begins in April, bringing heavy rain to the middle and lower reaches. By July and August the wet weather reaches the Sichuan Basin where the prevalence of mountainous terrain causes widespread rainfall. Therefore, as the water level caused by the earlier wet season starts to subside, the 'Sichuan waters' begin to threaten again.

In 1995 construction began on the Three Gorges Dam near Yichang and is scheduled for completion in 2009. The dam will measure about 600 feet and about 1.5 miles wide. The dam is expected to help control the flooding of the Yangtze River Valley. The Three Gorges (the Qutang Gorge, the Wuxia Gorge, and Xiling Gorge) will also be the largest electricity generating facility in the world. The hydroelectric generators will provide 1/9 of China's total power output.

There is a lot of controversy surrounding the construction of the dams. There are 140 villages, 1,600 factories and over 80,000 acres of growable land that will be destroyed. It may also cause animals to become extinct. The area is very prone to earthquakes because it lies directly on a fault line. Actually, the plateau and gorges were created by collision of the Indian-Australian plate, drifting northward, with the Eurasian plate that began over 40 million years ago and continues today.

It is the virtual definition of a monumental project -- a dam one and a half miles wide and more than 600 feet high that will create a reservoir hundreds of feet deep and nearly 400 miles long. The reservoir, its engineers say, will enable 10,000-ton ocean-going freighters to sail directly into the nation's interior for six months of each year, opening a region burgeoning with agricultural and manufactured products. And the dam's hydropower turbines are expected to create as much electricity as 18 nuclear power plants.

The project is China's Three Gorges Dam, and it has already been the subject of great international scrutiny. It is being called the largest construction project in China since the Great Wall. Many high-ranking Chinese officials expect the dam to become a potent symbol of their nation's vitality in the new century and the new millennium.

Chinese authorities hope the dam will take care of several major national problems with a single monumental stroke. The Three Gorges project is seen as an important future source of energy for China's growing electrical consumption. It is also expected to tame the fabled Yangzi River. The Yangzi's notorious floods have been recorded for millennia and have claimed more than 1 million lives in the past 100 years.

Some facts about the Three Gorges project: 

� Project expected to take 17 years; completion expected in 2009.

� An estimated 250,000 workers are involved in the project.

� The Three Gorges Reservoir will inundate 632 square kilometers (395 square miles) of land.

� An estimated 1.2 million people will be resettled by the dam.

� The project's 26 hydropower turbines are expected to produce 18.2 million kilowatts, up to one-ninth of China's output.

� The amount of concrete totals 26.43 million cubic meters, twice that of the Itaipu project in Brazil, currently the world's largest hydroelectric dam.

The father of modern China, Sun Yat-sen, is credited with first proposing the idea of a hydroelectric dam at Three Gorges in 1919. And in the mid-1950s, after devastating floods along the Yangzi, Mao Tse-tung ordered feasibility studies on damming the river.

The project includes a system of locks, the largest ever built, intended to bring ocean-going ships 1,500 miles inland to Chongqing, the capital of the municipality created from Sichuan Province in 1997 to encompass the project. The municipality, with more than 30 million people, is under the direct control of the central government in Beijing. Officials hope the combination of inexpensive electricity and cheap river transportation will further open the region to international investment -- making Chongqing a major business center.

The great expectations surrounding the Three Gorges Dam project also have generated a huge reservoir of controversy from within China and abroad.

 Chinese leaders have long dreamed of taming the Yangzi for power generation and flood control. The river's infamous floods have brought destruction and death for centuries -- 1 million deaths in the 20th century alone   

Non-governmental criticism of the project also has surfaced. Journalist Dai Qing was jailed for 10 months in 1989-90 after criticizing the Three Gorges project and, by extension, Li Peng, the former Chinese premier and Soviet-trained engineer who spearheaded the dam's construction.

 Dai calls Three Gorges "the most environmentally and socially destructive project in the world." She also calls for a halt to construction and supports the idea of a series of smaller, less disruptive construction projects on tributaries of the Yangzi.

Of further concern are claims the dam might become an environmental disaster. There have been little to no attempts made toward removing accumulations of toxic materials and other potential pollutants from industrial sites that will be inundated. Experts say such materials could leach into the reservoir, creating a health hazard. The relative lack of waste treatment plants in China also could mean run-off from communities around the dam would most likely go untreated directly into the reservoir and into the Yangzi.

"By severing the mighty river and slowing the flow of its water, the dam will cause pollution from industrial and residential sources to concentrate in the river, rather than be flushed out at sea," writes Chinese journalist Jin Hui in "The River Dragon Has Come!" a recently published collection of criticisms against the dam. "The result will be a poisoned river."

"I think China has embraced an energy dinosaur," says Dr. John Byrne, director of the University of Delaware's Center for Energy and Environmental Policy. "In terms of an American scale, this dam is somewhat akin to the electrical load between Philadelphia and Washington D.C. being served from a single power plant."  

Byrne is skeptical whether the huge amount of electricity expected to be generated by the Three Gorges project -- meant to produce power for Chongqing and places as far away as Shanghai -- can be efficiently and economically absorbed by China's electrical system.

The social element of Three Gorges has generated more questions than answers. The dam will "drown" more than 100 towns once the water starts to rise in 2003. Government estimates say 1.2 million people will be resettled and that new land is being provided for 300,000 farmers. Some observers say the government may be underestimating by as many as 700,000 the number of people who actually will be relocated.

The issue of the farmland, much of which has been tilled by the same Chinese families for centuries and will be lost under the reservoir's waters, is particularly important, Byrne says.

"One of the tragedies of this [project], if just from a regional standpoint, is that the land that is going to be flooded is some of the most fertile in China," says Byrne. "The land to where the population is to be relocated is much less fertile."

The frustrations of those caught up in the resettlement process have been well covered by the Chinese media. Even the People's Daily, the Chinese Communist Party's official newspaper, has editorialized against corruption and poor construction that have either delayed new housing or resulted in sub-standard buildings.

Historians also have questioned the dam's impact on attempts to preserve some aspects of China's long and illustrious history. Archaeologists and historians have estimated nearly 1,300 important sites will disappear under the reservoir's waters.

Most irreplaceable, according to some experts, are sites that are remnants of the homeland of the Ba, an ancient people who settled in the region about 4,000 years ago. A former curator at Beijing's National Museum of Chinese History describes the area as "the last and best place to study Ba culture."

Chinese officials note the dam may end up providing as much as one-ninth of the nation's electrical production. Considering that China burns 50 million tons of coal each year for energy, their point is that the environmental benefits outweigh the environmental damage.

It appears the Three Gorges project is too far along to be halted. More than 20,000 workers are working around the clock on the dam itself. The reservoir is expected to be at its full depth by 2009.

"The project's conception was monumental," says Byrne. "This was seen in the early years [of the project] as a way to show the advanced nature of Chinese society under socialism, to solve a problem that has existed in China for thousands of years... But when you're doing something on this scale, you should really make solving the problems your first priority. Unfortunately, China has decided to launch the project -- then solve the problems along the way."