Thirst for power
Since colonising Tibet in 1959, China has ripped out virgin forests,
dug up minerals and metals, and dumped nuclear waste with little
regard for the fragile ecology of the Tibetan plateau. To date,
warnings from Tibetans and their advocates abroad about the damage
caused by half a century of unchecked exploitation have so far been
largely unheeded by the international community, but the latest stage
of China=92s development is set to end the silence the Chinese Communist
Party has interpreted as global approval for its quest for wealth and
power.
Date:01/06/2004 Author:Lynne O=92Donnell
There=92s not much left in Qinghai these days. Gone are the roaming
herds of Tibetan antelope, white-lipped deer, Mongolian gazelle, wild
oxen and donkeys. Deep craters scar the earth, which is no longer a
lush carpet of grass and wildflowers. Few birds wing across the deep
blue sky and any water that is left in the mostly dried-up river beds
is black and deadly. There are hardly any people here, apart from a
few poachers on motorcycles who slaughter the remnants of the once-
great herds of Tibetan antelope, or chiru, for the fine fur that makes
illegal shahtoosh shawls for the graceful necks of the fa****onable
demi-monde. Springs that used to refresh nomads and their herds of
sheep, goats, yaks and horses have disappeared, grassland has been
replaced by rocky desert, mountainsides have collapsed and the surface
of the arid earth is pockmarked with abandoned excavation sites.
Indeed, large swathes of Qinghai, which have been part of China=92s far
south- west since an armed invasion in 1959, look like the moon. This
is the obscene legacy of China=92s modern gold rush on one of the most
sensitive and im****tant environments on earth =96 the Tibetan plateau,
where 10 of the great rivers of Asia begin their journey through 11
countries. Those rivers =96 Mekong, Indus, Brahmaputra, Salween,
Karnali, Sutlej, Arun, Manas, Yangtse and Yellow =96 provide water for
more than 85 per cent of Asia=92s people and almost 50 per cent of the
world=92s population. The Dalai Lama said in a speech marking the turn
of the millennium, =91Thus, the health of Tibet=92s environment is not an
inconsequential regional issue; it has a huge global significance
warranting international attention.=92
Now, the development drive that has brought China double-digit
economic growth, record foreign investment and unheard-of mortality
rates from air pollution is threatening the livelihood of those two
billion Asians who depend on the mighty rivers sourced on the Tibetan
Plateau that have nurtured and nourished great civilisations for
millennia. Having already logged Tibetan mountainsides bare,
encouraged a mining boom that turned the land upside down and poisoned
rivers with cyanide and arsenic, the Chinese government has embarked
on a frenzy of dam-building that is squeezing the lifeblood of many of
its close neighbours. Doris Shen, of the International Rivers Network
in California, says up to 300 dams are planned for China=92s south-
western region alone, from rivers that flow into Burma, Cambodia,
Laos, Vietnam and Thailand. Dams, built to provide the fuel for the
Chinese industrial revolution, have compounded deforestation,
desertification and grassland degradation, soil erosion and
landslides, mining and pollution that were already afflicting the
river economies of Asia. Floods are increasing, fish and animal stocks
are decreasing, water levels are fluctuating. The experts blame China.
=91China holds all the trump cards,=92 The Guardian recently quoted an
anonymous water analyst as saying in an article examining the impact
on the Mekong of dams on the upstream Lancang, in China=92s Yunnan
province, which borders Laos, Burma and Vietnam. =91If all these dams go
ahead, the river=92s hydrology will be significantly altered and no one
can begin to understand the social or ecological consequences.
China can do what it wants with impunity. It is a dangerous
situation.=92 The damage to downstream river ecologies from unregulated
tree felling in the upper reaches of the major Asian rivers was
becoming clear to experts outside Tibetan exile circles by the early
1990s. Sam ****tch, a Canadian scientist who until 2002 ran the China
and India programmes for the Potash and Phosphate Institute of Canada
and won a Chinese Friend****p Award for his work with Chinese farmers
on balanced fertilisation, expressed his concerns about the Mekong
tributaries to me in 1994. Working with some of the poorest farming
communities in south-western China, he was able to travel to areas few
western researchers had access to at that time. He noted that
riverbeds were rising, floods becoming more frequent, and farming land
eaten by the widening waters. There could be only one reason, he said:
logging. As the forests of Tibet were felled, topsoil had nothing to
adhere to, the rain had nothing to soak into and so the earth=92s
epidermis was swept into the rivers by the spring snow melt and summer
rains, raising the riverbeds and reducing their capacity to hold the
water. This process is most obvious in the Chinese city of Wuhan,
capital of Hubei province, which sits on the confluence of three
rivers, including the Yangtse, and is protected from water higher than
street level by dikes that need constant reinforcement. Until
recently, this was historic, slow and manageable but in the 1990s, as
the forests disappeared, the floods became more regular and severe.
After devastating floods on the Yangtse in 1998, which claimed many
more lives than the 4,150 the government admitted at the time, logging
was banned. In a clandestine re****ting trip to Hubei the following
year, I interviewed many villagers in one area outside Wuhan near a
dike that was famously breached by the swollen river. Without
exception, the people I spoke with said they had counted their dead in
the hundreds, but that officials had lied about the casualties and
re****ted them in single digits and the calamity had been turned into a
successful propaganda exercise that rehabilitated the People=92s
Liberation Army for a population that had hated the military since it
killed unarmed demonstrators in Beijing and other cities in 1989.
I was shown the gleaming marble monuments to a handful of teenage
soldiers who died fighting the rising waters. Nearby, where their
homes used to be, villagers eked out their lives in unfinished brick
huts that had been built to replace the homes swept away in the
floods. Money had run out before building was complete, probably, like
the funds allocated to flood prevention the year before, pocketed by
party flunkies. If the Chinese authorities cynically used the floods
to rebuild the army=92s image, the floods had also provided a sharp wake-
up call for the central government and local officials along the
6,380km length of the Yangtse. Having long denied that upstream
logging was a problem, and having spent decades extolling the virtues
of the Three Gorges dam, the ferocity of the 1998 summer floods spoke
for itself. The stripping of the Tibetan plateau was to blame, the
government-controlled media conceded like wide-eyed neophytes who=92d
never dreamed that trees had any use beyond chopsticks and matches. In
one of those instantaneous policy strokes peculiar to autocratic
regimes, logging was banned and the woodsmen were put to work
replanting forests that had been almost totally destroyed to provide
raw materials for the economic boom of the eastern provinces. =91The
Yangtse floods of 1998 really brought home to Beijing the consequences
of deforestation on the upper reaches of the Yangtse. They really
started to make that connection then,=92 said Kate Saunders, an
independent researcher on Tibetan affairs. =91[Then-prime minister] Zhu
Rongji was sent to Sichuan to investigate the environmental situation
soon afterwards, in an indication of the Party=92s concern.=92 The
communist rulers also started to proclaim even louder the virtues of
dams as cure-alls for floods to justify their hydroelectricity
schemes. And the next phase of China=92s assault on the vital water
resources of half the globe was launched. It is difficult to overstate
the im****tance of dams to the Chinese Communist Party=92s (CCP) vision.
Dams mean power =96 power to keep the sweatshop factories churning out
goods for ex****t to the wealthy west, and enduring power of governance
for the CCP.
The highest echelons of the party are stacked with engineers, many of
whom take a personal interest in massive hydraulic projects =96 like the
former premier, Li Peng, whose life dream is being realised with the
completion of the Three Gorges dam which will, it is claimed, generate
power equivalent to that of a dozen nuclear reactors. Such huge, high-
profile undertakings play into the patriotic pantheon of a government
that has expertly tied itself to the nationalistic concept of what it
means to be Chinese, a process that was accelerated after the
Tiananmen Square demonstrations and murders of 1989. Officials who
hitch themselves to big infrastructure projects =96 especially those
with superlatives listing them among the world=92s biggest, longest,
highest, most expensive =96 can bolster their political and financial
ambitions and help line the pockets of all those who walk in their
shadow. In Yunnan, there=92s plenty of money in dam building. Two large
dams have been completed on the Lancang, upstream of the Mekong, a
third is underway and another six are on the drawing board. Aimed, as
officials claim, not only at generating electricity but also
preventing floods, the dams have a profound impact on the rice growers
and fishermen of downstream communities. The tenth largest and twelfth
longest river in the world, the 4,800km-long Mekong begins in
Qinghai=92s Three Rivers=92 sources area near the provincial boundary of
the Tibet Autonomous Region, or TAR, as it was renamed when Beijing
incor****ated Tibet into the People=92s Republic and redrew the borders.
The Mekong traverses six countries =96 China, Burma, Laos, Cambodia,
Thailand, and Vietnam =96 before emptying into the South China Sea. It
sup****ts 250 million people, has a biological diversity comparable to
the Amazon, and supplies one of the world=92s most diverse fi****ng
industries. On the banks of Cambodia=92s famed Tongle Sap lake, a
wizened fisherman extends his arms to show the size of fish that
didn=92t get away in his youth, but which are now a dim memory. Today
the fish are smaller, he says, though he has little clue that the
massive Manwan Dam on the Lancang hundreds of miles upstream in Yunnan
has cut the numbers of fish that make it downstream to spawn. Annual
spring floods and autumn droughts are essential for bringing billions
of fish to the dense swamps around the lake, but the Chinese dams are
effectively smoothing the river=92s flow, eradicating those seasonal
highs and lows. =91The two existing dams on the Mekong, Manwan and
Dachaoshan, have impacted the upper lower Mekong. Water levels at
Chiang Saen are subject to irregular fluctuations since Manwan was
closed =96 presumably caused mainly by the operation of Manwan as a peak
load power station, so more water is released whenever there is an
increased power demand and reduced whenever there is less demand for
power. It also seems that flow in the river was cut off completely for
a few days in May 1993 to allow work on the dam or power station,=92 Dr
Ian Campbell, of the Mekong River Commission in Thailand, told me by
email. =91Manwan Dam has caused a drop in river-suspended sediment
concentrations following its closure and that impact was detectable as
far downstream as Pakse in southern Laos,=92 he said. Attention is now
focusing on the impact of the yet-to-be-completed Xiaowan dam, 15
times the size of Manwan. =91It may affect flows, especially in the dry
season, down in the lower Mekong countries including Cambodia. The
fishery is crucial here since it provides 80 per cent of animal
protein in the diets of people in the basin.=92
As the Chinese economic juggernaut rumbles on, demand for electricity
is soaring beyond the bullish estimates of the Chinese authorities,
who are now worried by power cuts in inland factory belts that are
essential for absorbing surplus labour, as farmers leave the land and
tens of millions of school-leavers enter the job market each year. The
government had predicted 2003 electricity usage would climb by five
per cent; instead it grew by a massive 15 per cent, leading to
forecasts that the north-eastern industrialised provinces will exhaust
current generating capacity by 2010. Figures like these create the
urgency for new power sources and while there appears to be a growing
awareness of the need to marry quality to quantity across the
industrial landscape, one contact =96 who has long worked with the
Chinese government in formulating production policy =96 said, on
condition that he wasn=92t named, that =91they have too much jockeying
between internal regions and ministries to even be united for their
own national good, let alone embracing Southeast and South Asia.=92 Of
China=92s 80,000 dams nationwide, the World Commission on Dams
classified 22,000 as large, half the world=92s total, and all but 22
built since the communists took over in 1949. Promises in recent years
to fold sustainability into industrialisation don=92t appear to have
affected the reality, especially where dams are concerned. Whereas the
west seems to have learned from disasters like Australia=92s Snowy River
scheme and America=92s Hoover Dam, China has many more planned.
The government has begun, however, to recognise that environmental
degradation is eating into real economic gains, with the People=92s
Daily noting that the average annual growth rate of 8.7 per cent over
the past 25 years should be slashed by more than two per cent to an
annual =91green GDP=92 growth rate of 6.5 per cent, when the cost of the
damage is taken into account. As in so many sectors, China=92s power
generation is among the most inefficient in the world, with official
figures showing that the energy consumed in producing a product worth
US$1 is 4.3 times higher in China than it is in the United States, 7.7
times higher than in Germany and France, and 11.5 times higher than in
Japan. =91China is a massive economy growing at an amazing rate. If the
present high-consumption and high-pollution growth mode is not
changed, China will lack sufficient resources and environmental
capacity to sustain its future development,=92 said Pan Yue, the deputy
head of the State Environmental Protection Administration. The recent
deferment of a massive project on Yunnan=92s Nu River, which runs into
Burma=92s Salween, brought a sliver of hope that the message is getting
through. Chinese media re****ted that the cascading dam, designed to
provide double the power of the Three Gorges project, was cancelled
for further impact studies on 1 April by order of Premier Wen Jiabao,
but an official of the Yunnan Huadian Nu River Hydropower Development
Company said two weeks later: =91Neither the instruction written by Wen,
nor any file containing the destiny of the project has reached us so
far.=92
In order to boost electricity to account for 30 per cent of the
country=92s power needs by 2030, the State Power Cor****ation=92s deputy
head, Chen Dongping, is on the record as saying that $36 billion would
be spent on building dams to generate power eight times the capacity
of the Three Gorges dam. Dams, he said, are clean. Could it be that
the reprieve for the Nu is just tem****ary, politically-expedient
window dressing? =91Maybe the money has already been spent by corrupt
officials,=92 said one London-based China watcher who asked not to be
named. =91Maybe the centre just wants to re-exert control over the
Yunnan officials to let them know who=92s boss and after the project has
been tweaked a bit it will go ahead. Everything in China is politics,
there=92s no such thing as altruism, or even environmentalism, at any
level of government.=92 Even if this project doesn=92t go ahead, another
nine dams, out of a total of 13 on the drawing board for the Nu-
Salween, are planned for the same Three Parallel Rivers area, which
Shen calls =91truly a magnificent ecological treasure=92. Kevin Li, a Hong
Kong-based consultant with the IRN=92s China programme who lobbied
against the Huadian dam, cautioned the plan could be =91revised or
simply repackaged=92 and noted that =91despite the huge opposition against
the Three Gorges dam, the project still went ahead.=92 Lynne O=92Donnell
is a freelance journalist The Case against Dams Since the 1930s, man
has tampered with rivers on an unprecedented scale: three-quarters of
the major rivers in the Northern hemisphere alone have been tamed or
harnessed.
The number of large dams worldwide has climbed from just over 5,000 in
1950 to more than 45,000 today. When a dam is built, especially on a
large river, it backs up months=92 or years=92 worth of a river=92s flow,
creating an enormous reservoir of water in the valley behind it that
floods everything in its path. This has led to: =95 An increase in water-
borne diseases =96 including malaria, bilharzia and schistosomiasis =96
from changes in the rivers=92 ecosystems. =95 The loss of annual floods
and flows of nutrient-rich silt needed to fertilise farmland
downstream, jeopardising the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of
farmers, in addition to those physically displaced by the dam. =95 The
significant and often irreversible destruction of entire river
ecosystems, and of wildlife, including forests, in the river valleys
behind dams as floodwaters rise. =95 The reduction of fish populations,
as the change from free-flowing river to reservoir prevents oxygen
levels from being replenished, prevents nutrients from reaching
fisheries downstream, and blocks the path of migratory fish such as
salmon. This is particularly serious for hundreds of thousands of
people who are dependent on fi****ng in large rivers to feed
themselves. =95 The creation of methane emissions from the rotting of
flooded vegetation and organic matter that flows into the reservoir =96
which in some cases can contribute more to global warming than
emissions from coal-fired power stations producing a similar amount of
electricity. =95 An increased risk of conflict when large dams are built
on major international rivers and reduce downstream flow to other
countries (as in the case for the proposed Illisu dam in Turkey on the
Tigris River, which could escalate tension with Syria or Iraq). =95 The
displacement and impoverishment of up to 80 million mostly poor and
indigenous people since large dams started being built, through the
destruction of their homes, their agricultural land, their
livelihoods, communities and culture, often without the provision of
anything approaching adequate compensation. =95
Dams have collapsed under the enormous pressure of water behind them.
According to Chinese government re****ts, in 1975, after one of the
wettest years ever, dam collapses killed 250,000 people, and caused
famine and disease among 11 million more. In the United States in
1976, the collapse of the Teton dam destroyed three towns and hundreds
of thousands of acres of farmland. Sources: World Bank=92s World
Commission on Large Dams, International Rivers Network Principle
Rivers of the region NAME Source Length Yellow River Amdo Bayanhar
(5266m) 5464 km Yangtze Mt Thangla (6328m) 6380 km Mekong Mt Thangla
4500 km Salween Mt Thangla 2800 km Brahmaputra Mt Tesi Range 2900 km
Karnali Mt Tesi Range 1609 km Sutlej Mt Tesi (Kailash) 1450 km Indus
Mt Tesi (6638m) 3100 km Arun Mt ****shapangma (8012m) 1207 km Manas Mt
Zholchen (6106m) 380 km Source: Dorjee 1996; DIIR 1992; Science Press,
Beijing 1990; DIIR Tibet 20008
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