China learns the limits of playing God Almighty

In 1956, China’s revolutionary leader Mao Zedong gave expression – in verse - to a searing national ambition: to tame the mighty Yangtze river. “Walls of stone will stand upstream to the west To hold back Wushan’s clouds and rain Till a smooth lake rises in the narrow gorges. The mountain goddess, if she is still there, Will marvel at a world so changed.” That poetic dream, entirely in resonance with Mao’s philosophy that Nature and everything that it offered were intended for taming and harnessing in the human interest, was realised long after he died. When it was completed in 2006, the Three Gorges Dam scored high on a lot of superlatives: the world’s largest hydroelectric project was an engineering feat, media reports of the day gushed. It was celebrated as a “miracle in the history of dam architecture”, and “a test of the Chinese people’s willpower and capabilities.”  Big, it appeared, was beautiful. Curiously, however, neither of China’s two top leaders – one of whom (Hu Jintao) was a hydrologist, and the other (Wen Jiabao) a geologist – attended the completion ceremony. It prompted speculation that the two modern Chinese leaders were disassociating themselves from a Mao-era monstrosity. By then, the enormous project had already come in for much criticism from experts for the human and environmental toll it would extract: more than a million people had been forcibly relocated; and the dam risked triggering geological crises that would cause incalculable harm. (Watch a documentary on the “ Un-gorgeous Three Gorges”) [caption id=“attachment_13019” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“In recent times, even the official Chinese narrative on the Three Gorges Dam project has moved away from triumphalism to one of sober acknowledgement that there are perhaps limits to playing God. Reuters”]  [/caption] One expert on China’s energy and environment, who reviewed the feasibility study for the project, even gave voice to his outrage in blunt terms. “This is not engineering and science, (but) merely expert prostitution,” he thundered. In more recent times, however, even the official Chinese narrative on the Three Gorges Dam project has moved away from triumphalism to one of sober acknowledgement that there are perhaps limits to playing God. In 2007, the official Chinese news agency Xinhua offered an extraordinarily candid assessment: “Chinese officials and experts have admitted the Three Gorges Dam project has caused an array of ecological ills, including more frequent landslides and pollution, and if preventive measures are not taken, there could be an environmental ‘catastrophe’.” The most recent sober assessment came on Thursday, after a meeting of China’s State Council (or the Council of Ministers), when a statement acknowledged that while the project had provided “huge comprehensive benefits, urgent problems must be resolved regarding the smooth relocation of residents, ecological protection, and geological disaster prevention” ( from Reuters). Strikingly, the meeting was presided over by Premier Wen. But the Three Gorges Dam isn’t the only project that symbolises a residual impulse to conquer Nature in the service of humans. China’s efforts at “weather modification” – to keep the inaugural ceremony of the 2008 Olympics free of inclement weather, for instance – have been widely acclaimed, although they have given rise to concern in some quarters that China might be tempted to use weather as a “weapon of war” – in the way that the US did during the Vietnam War. (The concern arises principally because China is not a signatory to the Enmod Convention.) A few other Chinese attempts at playing God are even more outlandish. One that was actively considered by China at one time (but mercifully appears to have been abandoned) was a project to blast a tunnel through the Himalayas using nuclear weapons. (Read more about that lunacy, the brainchild of a Mao-era hydrologist named Guo Kai, here and here.) Curiously, however, that tunnel-boring dream appears to have proved contagious, going by an ongoing Indian effort in Kashmir. But perhaps China’s most ambitious scheme to play God – a Mao-era plan to divert water from the Yangtze in the south to the desert lands north of the Yellow River – is still on the radar. Again, environment experts warn that the project is a disaster in the making: it could render the Yangtze wholly dry.  But although political support for the project is dwindling, it appears that the quest to tame Nature hasn’t  entirely been abandoned.