River Town (15 page)

I TAUGHT MY WRITING CLASS
from a Chinese-published text called
A Handbook of Writing
. Like all of the books we used, its political intent was never understated, and the chapter on “Argumentation” featured a model essay entitled “The Three Gorges Project Is Beneficial.”

It was a standard five-paragraph essay and the opening section explained some of the risks that had led people to oppose the project: flooded scenery and cultural relics, endangered species that might be pushed to extinction, the threat of earthquake, landslide, or war destroying a dam that would hold back a lake four hundred miles long. “In short,” the second paragraph concluded, “the risks of the project may be too great for it to be beneficial.”

The next two sentences provided the transition. “Their worries and warnings are well justified,” the essay continued. “But we should not give up eating for fear of choking.” And the writer went on to describe the benefits—more electricity, improved transportation, better flood control—and concluded by asserting that the Three Gorges Project had more advantages than disadvantages.

I had some moral qualms about teaching a model persuasive essay whose topic had been banned from public debate in China since 1987—this seemed a slap in the face to the very notion of argumentation. At worst it was an exercise in propaganda, and at best it didn't seem particularly sporting. But I had nothing else to work with, and
the truth was that the essay, apart from its political agenda, provided a good structural model. My job was to teach the students how to write such a composition, and so I went ahead and taught it. I reckoned there was no sense in giving up eating for fear of choking.

I was punished by having that transition sentence infect my students' papers for the rest of the term. They were accustomed to learning by rote, which meant that they often followed models to the point of plagiarism. They were also inveterate copiers; it wasn't uncommon to receive the exact same paper from two or three students. There wasn't really a sense of wrong associated with these acts—all through school they had been taught to imitate models, and copy things, and accept what they were told without question, and often that was what they did.

When I told them that the Three Gorges essay was a good model, they listened carefully and adopted its nuances in future work. I assigned argumentative essays on whether students should be required to do morning exercises, and many of them opened their compositions by describing the benefits of the morning routine. After that was finished, they made their shift: “But we should not give up eating for fear of choking.” Even students who were writing on opposite sides of the issue used that same transition. Later I assigned an argumentative essay on Hamlet's character, and they listed his shortcomings—indecisiveness, cruelty to Ophelia—and many of them seemed like good papers until suddenly that cursed sentence came from nowhere and boomed out, “But we should not give up eating for fear of choking.” I came to loathe the phrase, and repeatedly I told them that it was a horrid transition, but it always reappeared. At last I gave up, consoling myself by thinking darkly of the day when the river was dammed, and the Yangtze would rise up and carry away all of the
Handbooks of Writing
and smash them in the dam's seven-hundred-megawatt turbines.

That was only fancy, of course—the new reservoir would cause the river to rise, but it wouldn't climb as high as the teaching building. Some of my students said it would hardly reach the middle of the East River district, while others said it would flood the entire neighborhood, rising all the way to the college's front gates. None of them knew for certain, but they didn't seem to care. They had been told that the dam was beneficial, and that was enough.

 

IN TOWN I KNEW EXACTLY
where the waterline of the new Yangtze would be, because there were signs that marked its future rise. One was in the old part of Fuling, painted in red on the side of a snack shop. There was another in downtown's Mid-Mountain Road, which was the second big street above the docks.

Both of these signs said the same thing in huge red numbers: “177m.” This figure represented the future water level of the reservoir, which at its maximum could be filled to an elevation of 177 meters (581 feet) above sea level. There were red signs like this in all of the Yangtze settlements, and heading downstream the numbers marched steadily up the hillsides, until at last you came to low-lying towns like Wushan, where the signs were so far above the city that nothing would be left once the dam reached full capacity in 2009.

Because Fuling lies three hundred miles upstream from the dam site, the rise of the river here won't be nearly as dramatic as in places like Wushan. But even in Fuling the red numbers foreshadow what will be a massive change: taking the White Crane Ridge as Fuling's traditional winter benchmark, the surface of the new reservoir will be more than 130 feet above the Tang Dynasty twin carp.

Sometimes when I was in town I'd stop and watch the 177m signs for a few minutes on an average morning. Outside the snack shop, children would be playing, and stick-stick soldiers would be carrying loads up the steps, and the woman who owned the shop would have a yellow pot of bean curd steaming in her doorway. On Mid-Mountain Road there would be unemployed laborers standing with bow saws and paintbrushes, looking for work, and shoeshine men and small-time entrepreneurs would have their stands set up next to the sign. Everywhere I looked, it was typical, everyday life; and yet in a decade all of it would be below the level of the new reservoir. And by walking downhill I could see just how much more of the city would be affected: the majority of the old town with its buildings of tile and wood, and the entire shop district of Mid-Mountain Road and Riverside Road. They were lively parts of the city, and the people always seemed too busy to look twice at those signs. The river wasn't scheduled to start rising until 2003, which for the residents of Fuling was a long time away. They had other things to worry about.

They also had the government's promise that it would build a
dike around Fuling to protect these low-lying districts. Whenever I asked people about the Three Gorges Project, they always shrugged and said that the city was going to build a 150-foot-high
shuiba
, a water-wall, which meant that the new dam wouldn't affect their homes. But the details of this dike seemed awfully vague. Would it surround the entire city? When would it be built? If they built a 150-foot high wall next to your home, wouldn't that be awfully dark and unpleasant? And what about safety—could you really trust the
shuiba?
Whenever I asked these questions, nobody had any answers, and it seemed that none of them entertained such doubts. There was going to be a
shuiba
—that was all they knew and all that mattered. Even when I left Fuling, in the summer of 1998, construction of the dike hadn't yet begun, but still I didn't hear of any worries or concerns.

Mostly I heard the advantages of the dam, which followed the three points of my textbook's essay: electricity, flood control, and transportation. These are important issues for people in a place like Fuling, and with regard to all three the new dam will make a substantial difference. By far it will be the largest hydroelectric dam in the world, its wall roughly six times the length of the Hoover Dam's, and the Three Gorges Dam's twenty-six massive turbines will produce 18,100 megawatts of electricity—the equivalent of ten nuclear reactors, enough energy to boost China's national output by 10 percent. The Yangtze's summer floods, which in the past six decades have killed more than 330,000 people, will be better controlled by the dam. In effect, it will turn Chongqing into a seaport, as ten-thousand-ton ships—three times the size of the current limit—will be able to navigate the upper river.

This last point was of particular interest to Fuling, because the largest ships will not be able to go all the way to Chongqing in all seasons. There are some narrow river passages between the two cities, and speculation is that Fuling will become a major port to serve boats too large to reach Chongqing. This will be a significant change, as Fuling, with its lightly populated Wu River, has previously played a relatively small role in Sichuan's transportation network. More important, this new status will end the city's isolation. When I arrived in Fuling, construction had already begun on a high-speed expressway that would run to Chongqing, and there was talk of building a railroad sometime after the year 2000. For the people of Fuling these were long-awaited
changes; soon their city would become something more than a forgotten river town, and they would no longer be at the mercy of the Yangtze and its slow boats.

But at the same time this begged another obvious question: Can one really believe that all of the people along the Yangtze—the boat captains, the businessmen, the flood-fearing peasants—will no longer be at the mercy of the river? Or will the river still be in control, with the stakes of disaster raised by the effort to harness the Yangtze? The dam is being constructed on an earthquake fault, and the unstable Gorges have a long history of enormous landslides that cause massive waves. And the Yangtze isn't just water; the river carries a thousand times as much silt as the muddy Mississippi. Cities like Chongqing and Fuling spew their sewage more or less untreated into the river, as well as waste from their factories, and there is speculation that all of this filth and silt will back up behind the dam. A ten-thousand-ton ship won't be of much use in a four-hundred-mile-long bog.

For these and other reasons, the project has long inspired apocalyptic visions from a host of experts, both Chinese and foreign. They envision a broken dam, a silt-filled reservoir; they warn that the rising river will carry new poisons that previously had been stored on its banks. The reservoir will flood thirteen cities, 140 towns, and 1,352 villages; it will swamp 650 factories and 139 power stations. For more than ten thousand years the river valley has been home to human civilization, and all of man's endless traces, the garbage dumps and the chemical deposits, will be held stagnant in the new reservoir. And the river isn't something to be tinkered with lightly—over 350 million people live in the Yangtze's watershed, more than in America and Canada combined, one person out of every twelve on earth.

Experts warn that mercury, lead, and other poisons from the flooded areas could be carried into people's water supplies, and they fear the outbreak of endemic infections along the soggy new valley: malaria, leptospirosis, Japanese B encephalitis. The dam's forty thousand construction workers, all of whom are living temporary lives in temporary housing, will spread gonorrhea via the prostitutes who flock to the workers' cities. AIDS could run the same course. And where will these workers go when the dam is finished?

And what about the nearly two million people, mostly peasants,
who will be displaced by the new reservoir? The government has promised them benefits of jobs and land, which will cost one-third of the entire project's price tag—thirty billion dollars, according to conservative estimates. But eastern Sichuan has long been an isolated part of the country, and local officials have little direct contact with the central government. Sending huge sums of money down the river is far more likely to lead to corruption rather than efficient population transfer.

There are countless tombs, dozens of ancient temples, and many priceless cultural relics like the White Crane Ridge. What will be done with those? The ridge would be a major historical monument in most parts of the world, but there is so much history in the Three Gorges region that Fuling's carvings don't even make the A-list of threatened artifacts. Downstream is Shibaozhai, a stunning twelve-story pagoda from the eighteenth century, and beyond that is Yunyang's seventeen-hundred-year-old temple to Zhang Fei, a hero from the Three Kingdoms era. Both will be lost if expensive preservation measures aren't undertaken. And there are tombs of the Ba people, who lived in Fuling and the other Yangtze regions more than two thousand years ago, and whose remains have never been thoroughly studied. Little is known about them, and nothing more will be learned after their relics are flooded forever.

The dam also threatens wildlife: the Siberian crane, the cloud leopard, the finless porpoise, the Chinese alligator, the Chinese white river dolphin, the Chinese sturgeon, and 172 other species of fish. Already the development of the Yangtze, which carries 80 percent of China's river traffic, has been environmentally costly, and there are but one hundred river dolphins left. This is one of five freshwater dolphin species in the world, and for millennia it adapted to the muddy waters of the Yangtze until now it is virtually blind, relying on highly developed sonar capabilities. But today the river is full of boats, with the racket of engines growing louder every year, and the dolphin, deafened by technology and blinded by evolution, is already having trouble avoiding danger and finding mates. Ten-thousand-ton ocean vessels might finish off the species.

These points have been made throughout the decades that the dam has been considered by Chinese leaders. The project was first con
ceived by Sun Yat-sen in 1919, and it was seriously considered by both Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong. For the dictators it had a classic Chinese appeal, at once pragmatic and grandiose—a way to modernize a poor country while rallying national pride, a modern-day infrastructure project on the scale of the Great Wall and the Grand Canal. Mao's engineers completed a full-scale survey in 1955, and they might have started construction if not for the distractions of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.

But there were always voices of dissent. Even in the 1980s, as Deng Xiaoping and Premier Li Peng moved closer to beginning actual work on the dam, it was one of the few major issues in China that could be debated publicly. Criticism was accepted, and there was no shortage of it; many experts believed that constructing a series of smaller dams on the Yangtze and its tributaries would have many of the same benefits without the risks. The debates continued until finally in 1987 the government tired of this version of democracy and silenced it. If China's leaders wanted the largest dam in the world, it would be built, regardless of the risks. None of the difficulties mattered—the silt, the earthquakes, the lost relics, the extinct species, the displaced peasants. The experts could be ignored, just as they had been ignored so many times in the past: when Mao encouraged high birth rates in the 1950s and 1960s; when the Great Leap Forward was launched; when the Cultural Revolution began. Sometimes you need decision rather than debate. There's no sense in giving up eating for fear of choking.