So in building the monumental Three Gorges dam, the Chinese government has already displaced hundreds of thousands of people from their old communities because they were to be flooded. Now millions more — some of them folks already relocated — are being moved.
At least four million people are to be moved from the area around China’s Three Gorges Dam amid warnings of an “environmental catastrophe”. The announcement by state media follows reports that the dam could cause landslides, soil erosion and pollution. Critics have long warned the dam, the world’s largest hydro-electric project, could cause huge environmental damage.
Millions of people are now set to be relocated to the sprawling city of Chongqing at the reservoir’s west end. The vice-mayor of the city, Yu Yuanmu, was quoted as saying the relocations were necessary to “protect the ecology of the reservoir area”, which “has a vulnerable environment”.
[…] Two weeks ago the dam’s head of construction, Wang Xiaofeng, said the ecological effects of the dam could not be ignored. The problems included landslides caused by erosion on the steep hills around the dam, conflicts over land shortages, deteriorating quality of drinking water and pollution seeping from submerged industrial sites.
Landslides crashing into the reservoir have then produced huge waves that have damaged the shoreline.
It seems unlikely that these particular issues couldn’t — or even weren’t — considered before this went into place. Regardless, and aside from just general concerns over whether the thing is going to collapse and unleash a tsunami-like flood wave, this just seems to be adding to what was already shaping up to be a social disaster.
Critics of the Three Gorges Dam warned of all the problems now emerging years ago, says the BBC’s correspondent Chris Xia. But the project was backed by powerful figures, like former Prime Minister Li Peng and former President Jiang Zemin, so opposition was quashed.
Official recognition of the problems, he says, seems to indicate an attempt by the current leadership to distance itself from the dam’s toxic legacy.
Spiffy.