Dammed if You Do, Dammed if You Don’t

CNN published China’s Three Gorges Dam is one of the largest ever created. Was it worth it?

This comprehensive report on a Chinese large capital project is impressive for covering more than the usual choppy piece about China filled with buzzwords. Yet, I found some fundamental errors that detracted from the accuracy of the story. For example, the people who were initially relocated for the dam was 2 million, not a measly 1.4 million.

True that the Yangtze river flooding has been a problem noted in historic texts for millennia. The fact that China has created a solution that has worked for these years so far is an incredible feat for Chinese history. The hydropower itself gain is worth the relocation of those 2 million people. It is very easy for another country to jeer at its financial gain and losses in such a short span. For example, 156 persons dead from recent flooding for Chinese standards is an absolute success, when deaths of thousands were typical annual fatalities in the recent past. 

I don’t agree with much of Chinese politics. I do commend them for working on an infrastructure at a scale commensurate with its huge population. It is way too premature to say the Dam is a poor investment. In the context of Chinese historical projects, such as sewers and bridges, the price is weighed against 80-100 years and against tens of millions of lives who live in modern homes with toilets. This is not the scale the US is used to. 

A more apt analogy regarding the return on the investment would be to complain that the current American highway system in urban centers is too crowded for vehicular traffic. Well, if we go back to 1950s, the interstate highway system was a huge undertaking. Back then, when most of Americans went to work via buses and downtown trains, many urban American families lived without ever owning a car. No one anticipated two car households. Is it fair to say in 2020 that the whole highway system is a fiasco? 

For these reasons, my advice to readers who are interested in learning about China is this: reading a story about China means you have to sift it for what is the point. Is the point for the US to laugh at China regarding another “failed modernization project”?

There are many ways that US and Chinese relationship are strained right now. Articles in English written by Chinese and non-Asian journalists alike are politicized. I would try and understand this article with more forgiveness than it is written. The editing also could have organized the information better for understanding China, rather than a critique of its underestimation of flood water. Where a dam in Northwest US was broken up and reversed to restore estuary and ecological balance, that is a luxury that millions of Chinese don’t have. American geographic locales that have returned water to its natural paths happen to be sparsely populated. That is hardly China’s problem.