What Price Progress?

Three Gorges disaster symptomatic of China’s unsustainable development.

In an embarassing and unprecedented admission of culpability, Chinese government officials have this week admitted that the highly-vaunted Three Gorges Project is on the brink of becoming a massive ecological disaster. Human rights and environmental activists have always opposed the US$22 billion dam, citing its disastrous impact on both local people and the environment; construction and flooding have already meant the relocation of nearly 1.5 million Chinese citizens.

For more than a decade China has promoted the world’s biggest hydro-electric project as the best way to end centuries of floods along the basin of the Chang Jiang (Yangtze River) and to provide energy (18,000 MW) to fuel the country’s economic boom. National and international opposition to the dam was ignored, as the Three Gorges was lauded as the greatest feat of engineering since the Great Wall.

However, Beijing has now listed a whole host of dam-related problems, including conflicts over land shortages, ecological degradation as a result of irrational development, and erosion and landslides on steep hills around the dam. Other authorities have already raised concerns over algal blooms downstream from the Three Gorges and a general deterioration in aquatic life. A survey conducted last year officially declared the baiji, or Yangtze river dolphin, extinct, and the Yangtze finless porpoise is going the same way. Pollution, overfishing and habitat disturbance are blamed.

One of the most worrying consequences of the Three Gorges project has been the sharp increase in landslides around the dam. Studies by geologists have shown that the water seepage and huge pressure changes are weakening the banks. One official said that the shore of the reservoir had collapsed in 91 places and a total of 36 kilometres (22 miles) had already caved in. Landslides have produced massive waves as high as 50 metres (165ft), and in July a mountain along a Yangtze tributary collapsed, killing 24 people.

In the face of a concerted pre-Olympic PR job, China’s environmental problems are steadily worsening. Water pollution and water scarcity are increasingly hampering the economy, record levels of air pollution are endangering the health of millions of Chinese, and much of the country’s land is rapidly becoming desert. China has become a world leader in air and water pollution and land degradation, and a top contributor to some of the world’s most critical global environmental problems, such as the illegal timber trade, trade in endangered species, marine pollution, and climate change. It is estimated that China’s pollution problems now cost the country more than US$200 billion a year, roughly 10 percent of total Chinese GDP.

As China’s environmental prblems worsen, so do the risks to its economy, public health, social stability, and international reputation. Unfortunately, many of the problems stem from the fact that Beijing is not in effective control at a provincial and local level. In fact, local officials rarely heed Beijing’s environmental mandates, preferring to concentrate their energies and resources on making more money. The truth is that ameliorating China’s environmental crisis will require more than mere target-setting and big money schemes; it will require radical and comprehensive political and economic reform.

Image source: Times, Guardian

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