The Three Gorges Project

The Three Gorges, which sits astride the Hubei and Sichuan border, is a strategic choke-point at which floods that originate in Sichuan province (and devastate Hubei, Hunan, and other localities downstream) could theoretically be contained. Moreover, the reservoir that would be formed by a dam in the Three Gorges could drive turbines that would energize

much of central and eastern China's energy-starved industry. Finally, raising the water level in the gorges could improve navigation and increase the size of ships able to reach Chongqing, now China's largest city. So strategic is the Three Gorges that leaders from Sun Yatsen, through Mao Zedong, to Deng Xiaoping, Zhao Ziyang, and Li Peng have considered the project.

The undertaking has been approved at least twice "in principle" in the post-1949 era (once in 1958 at the Chengdu Conference and again in April 1984),^[39] only to have the start of construction aborted because approval to commence actual building had been made contingent upon the resolution of myriad, presumably minor, technical, financial, and political details, such as, How high should the dam be? What is to be done with the displaced persons, inundated factories, cadres out of work, grain production and tax revenues that would evaporate, and administrative centers? Who pays, how much, for all this relocation, and where do you put the people? What would be the effect of such a huge project on upstream fisheries and estuaries and harbors above and below the dam? What would be the useful life of the dam, given siltation? How will shipping across the dam be affected, and how much shipping growth is it prudent to plan for? Is flood control best achieved by one gigantic project, or several smaller ones? Who will receive the resulting electrical power? Can it be efficiently transmitted to distant locations where it is most urgently needed, and at what cost? Is a dam of this scale safe? Or would it be, as Mao and the Ministry of National Defense at times feared, a huge "bowl of water on our heads"?

Each of these questions has no obvious answer, and the various possibilities all have their popular and bureaucratic constituencies, which are not averse to making their case in protracted consultations. I shall not recount here the more than three decades of the project's tribulations; these have been well documented elsewhere.^[40] But I can advance a generalization that I believe will accurately predict both bureaucratic and local behavior most of the time—an "iron law of bargaining." The locality or bureaucracy will almost always exaggerate the costs that another unit's proposal will inflict, minimize the benefits received, exaggerate the mafan (bother) to itself, exaggerate the benefits others receive, understate its own resources, overstate the resources of others, and generate one-sided data supportive of its case.

As a result of such processes, in the case of the Three Gorges Project, promoters of the project face a bargaining dilemma: to weld a coalition big enough to win support for the dam, they must provide benefits to a

vast constellation of groups. But this requires a dam so enormous that the resulting costs and negative outcomes create intense opposition, high financial expenditures, and other risks that top decision-makers are loath to ignore.

The system has been unable to reach closure on this issue after almost three decades of wrangling. In May 1983 the State Planning Commission (SPC), then headed by Yao Yilin, convened a meeting to assess the Three Gorges feasibility study, which had been submitted to it by the MWCEP and the Yangtze River Valley Planning Office (YRVPO). This study assumed a water level of 150 meters, which was comparatively low and thereby would reduce both negative outcomes (displaced persons and inundated urban and rural land) and simultaneously reduce benefits (to shipping, flood control, and electrical-power generation). Yao declared:

For more than twenty years the debate over the Three Gorges water resources project has concentrated principally on the problem of the dam's height. That a high dam generates more electricity and that the flood control results are better is easy to see. However, the inundation is too much, the investment is too big, the masses upstream are unable to agree, the burdens on the state finance also cannot be borne. However, the relevant ministries and localities have not been reconciled to the low dam and, because of this we have debated for many years and still are unable to decide. If we continue to debate, I think this generation of ours will be unable to accomplish anything on this.^[41]

The battle continues without respite. In December 1988 the cover on Beijing Review proclaimed, "Three Gorges Project Given the Go-Ahead." Scarcely a month later Vice-Premier Yao told the fourth meeting of the Standing Committee of the Seventh Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, "In the next five years, it is absolutely impossible to start the Sanxia Project, so people do not need to spend too much energy debating the issue for the time being."^[42]