Dam Canadians
China's destructive Three Gorges project has links to home
BY Rosalyn Yake
Photography by Reuters: David Gray
This summer, while people around the world feel the excitement of the Beijing Olympics, millions of Chinese will be pondering their futures that are now in turmoil because of the monstrous Three Gorges Dam, a project with a surprisingly close connection to Canada.
Stretching along 660 kilometres of the Yangtze River, the Three Gorges Dam is the world’s largest and most powerful hydroelectric project. It is also the most disastrous. By the time the dam—projected to cost $25 billion—is fully functional and producing its 22,400 megawatts of power, as many as 4 million people will have been displaced and hundreds of villages, temples and tombs will have been destroyed.
Rising to the surface of this debacle is Canada’s role in funding the mammoth project—a little-discussed controversy that stems back to 1988, when the Canadian International Development Agency footed a $14-million study examining the dam’s viability.
Chinese leaders had dreamed of building the dam decades before, hoping to tame the Yangtze’s vicious floods and fuelling the country’s industrialization. But the economic hardships of the 1950s and 1960s made this impossible. The idea was revived in the late 1970s, and China turned to Canada’s renowned hydroelectric experts for help. Hydro-Québec, which was involved in the CIDA study, gave the project the green light, provided the dam’s waters not exceed a depth of 160 metres. Chinese leaders later released plans to exceed that height by 15 metres, allowing more water and energy to be directed to the country’s parched north. Activists caught wind of the plan and launched protests. They feared the mega-dam would put more pressure on nearby seismic lines, causing earthquakes and landslides, and further endangering the region’s threatened animals and plants.
CIDA pulled out of the project in 1992, officially citing concern over the design, a short-lived decision that was reversed two years later during a Canadian trade mission to China. Then-prime-minister Jean Chrétien announced his support for the dam against the backdrop of an upcoming Quebec referendum, offering a $23.5 million loan to the People’s Construction Bank of China. The loan, financed by Export Development Canada, reopened the sluice gates to millions of dollars for Quebec hydroelectric companies.
“What we’ve found most appalling about the Canadian companies that did the feasibility study with CIDA is that they glossed over all the risks and costs and problems that we’re now seeing materialize along the river,”says Gráinne Ryder of Probe International, a Toronto-based organization involved in Up the Yangtze, a Canadian documentary released last winter about the dam. “They downplayed these problems in order to justify the project and win approval from the Chinese government.”
With less than a year until the dam’s turbines are expected to be complete, the human face of the disaster continues to surface. Ancient pagodas and historic relics crumble in the wake of the dam’s floods, as farmers trek along the slick mud of deserted towns. But like the Yangtze’s flowing waters, activists like Ryder won’t sit still. She’s immersed in an ongoing fight to have Canada compensate the migrants who have suffered socially and financially because of the dam.
“We’ve argued the government could provide legal aid to migrants who have been mistreated by authorities or for resettlement, or for people entitled to land they were promised [by the Chinese government],” she explains. “These are victims of a project that the Canadian government shares responsibility for. We have a duty to step up and provide relief to those victims.”
