The Three Gorges Dam and China's Energy Dilemma.

• Author: Qing, Dai

Energy production and utilization in China have undergone enormous changes throughout the 20th century. One of the poorest nations in the world during the 1930s, with electrical output that was miniscule in comparison to neighboring countries such as Japan, China has experienced tremendous growth in its energy sector since the 1949 Communist takeover. This growth quickly accelerated with the introduction of market reforms in 1978, and as a result, China is now the world's fourth largest producer and consumer of electrical power.(1)

This energy has not only fueled domestic economic growth rates of 8 to 10 percent during the 1980s and early 1990s, but it has also turned the People's Republic of China (PRC) into a major indigenous producer of energy equipment and an important buyer on the international market. One of the most energy-intensive economies in the world, China consumed 37 quadrillion British thermal units (Btus) of energy in 1996, two-thirds by its industrial sector. Of total energy production in the same year, 70 percent came from coal-fired thermal plants that burned 1.4 billion tons of coal.(2) Consequently, China has attracted the interest of such notable energy multinationals as the American corporations Bechtel and Westinghouse and Switzerland's Asea Brown Boveri (ABB), and has received huge financial support for various energy projects from the World Bank and the U.S. Export-Import Bank.(3)

Unfortunately, its heavy reliance on coal as a source of energy has made China a major contributor to carbon emissions. In 1996 total emissions were 805 million tons, or 13 percent of the world's total, second only to the United States in gross terms.(4) Encouraging China to sign on to major international agreements to control air and other forms of pollution has been, not surprisingly, a major goal of participants at international conferences, such as the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. China's energy use has also been a focus of interest by the Clinton Administration in the United States, by the increasingly active environmental bureaucracy in the Chinese government and by a surprisingly vigorous environmental movement in China led by newly-formed nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).(5) Yet despite the fact that five of the top 10 most polluted urban areas in the world are located in China--including Chongqing in the province of Sichuan--the Chinese government has put great emphasis, beginning in the early 1980s, on expanding electrical power generation by as much as 9 percent annually, with much of it coming from increased production and burning of coal.(6)

As the Asian economic crisis in the late 19908 brought a slowdown in China's rate of economic growth, the country's insatiable demand for electricity seemed to ebb as some regions of the country experienced an excess supply, while the nation as a whole focused increasingly on environmental protection and energy conservation measures.(7) Policy conflicts over such issues as coal versus other forms of energy production--especially hydropower--received increased domestic and international attention, along with continuing debates over whether China should rely on such mammoth energy projects as the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River to power the economy into the 21st century This paper will examine this debate, and situate it within a larger historical perspective that evaluates the twists and turns in Chinese energy policy from 1949 to the present. Particular attention will be paid to the viability and practicality of the Three Gorges Dam.

THE THREE GORGES DAM

The Yangtze River is the third longest river in the world, measuring approximately 6,390 kilometers from its headwaters at the Gelandandong Glacier in Tibet to its mouth near Shanghai on China's eastern seaboard. Known in China as simply the "long river" (Changjiang), the Yangtze is also considered the country's "golden waterway," providing cheap, if sometimes dangerous, passage for cargo and passenger ships that have plied its waters for more than 2,000 years.(8) In addition, the Yangtze River basin, with literally thousands of tributaries, is home to some 300 million people and one of the world's most fertile regions. In an 11-month growing season up to three varieties of rice and other crops are raised in the rich alluvial soil left behind by centuries of flooding.

Just north of the city of Yichang in Hubei province, where the Yangtze levels out and meanders across the industrially and agriculturally rich regions of central China, is Sandouping, the site of the Three Gorges Dam now under construction. Authorized in 1992 by the National People's Congress (NPC), China's nominal parliament, the Three Gorges project will be the world's largest hydroelectric and water control project upon its completion, estimated to be in the year 2009. Slated to rise 185 meters and extend 2 kilometers across the river, this mammoth edifice will create a reservoir capable of storing 40 billion cubic meters of water and extending 600 kilometers upstream, from Sandouping to just south of the city of Chongqing in Sichuan province. The reservoir will displace 1.9 million Yangtze Valley residents, half of whom are farmers, and inundate some of the country's most cherished cultural antiquities from a region that has been inhabited since Neolithic times.(9)

In terms of electrical generation, the dam is to have an installed capacity of 18,000 megawatts (MW) providing 85 billion kilowatt hours of electricity--that is, 10 percent of the country's entire capacity as of 1993. According to estimates, it would thereby eliminate the annual burning of 40 to 50 million tons of coal, thus significantly reducing air pollution in the Yangtze Valley. In addition, the dam is officially advertised as providing long-term solutions to the perennial problems of severe flooding on the Yangtze, which have caused the loss of tens of thousands of lives over the past century and periodic losses in agricultural and industrial production. Indeed, when the Three Gorges Dam was first approved by China's Communist leaders in the 1950s--though construction was subsequently postponed because of political and economic turmoil brought on by ill-conceived government policies--it came in response to devastation wrought by the 1954 Yangtze River flood, which cost nearly 30,000 lives. Flood control, not energy production, became the raison d'etre of China's hydropower officials, who at that time supported the massive dam "as the most effective and permanent solution" to such devastating Yangtze floods.(10) (It must be remembered that, in order to convince Mao Zedong of this proposal, these officials were forced to inflate the power production capacity of the project, otherwise the imprimatur of the "great leader" would not have been forthcoming.(11))

But the Three Gorges project was not launched until three decades after the 1958 energy conference where Mao officially endorsed it. The long delay was largely a function of natural disasters and political failure in China during these decades: namely, the havoc caused by the Great Leap Forward (1958 to 1960) and the subsequent three-year famine that cost upwards of 30 million deaths, followed by the internecine conflict and social turmoil created by the Cultural Revolution (1966 to 1976). The project was resuscitated in the 1970s by its staunchest advocates--the so-called "red specialists" who were trained in the Soviet Union as engineers and scientists and are China's greatest proponents of "grandiose" engineering and energy projects--only to be put on hold because of the financial limitations of the central government and opposition among key energy officials, such as Mao's top energy advisor Li Rui.(12)

In 1989, however, the political landscape in China underwent enormous changes that allowed the project's advocates to win the final go-ahead for its construction. In the wake of the Tiananmen massacre in June 1989, several top officials opposed to the dam were removed from their leadership positions, while the role of then-Premier Li Peng in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was substantially strengthened.(13) Though confronted with serious opposition in the National People's Congress, where one-third of the delegates voted against or abstained on the Three Gorges Resolution--an unusual display of public opposition in this otherwise rubber-stamp body--the project was begun and construction was soon accelerated to ensure its completion by the year 2009.

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ENERGY PRODUCTION IN CHINA

Prior to 1949 more than 80 percent of the Chinese relied on kerosene lamps for illumination and burned wheat chaff and coal for heating. Legend has it that when John D. Rockefeller considered the possibilities of selling oil products to China with its 250 million people in the late 19th century, he believed Standard Oil had found its dream market.(14) Twenty years later, an American dam expert, J.L. Savage, visited the Three Gorges region on the Yangtze River and proposed the construction of a huge dam near the inland city of Yichang in Hubei province as a centerpiece for then-President Sun Yat-sen's National Development Plan.(15) In the midst of China's domestic political crisis and especially after the Japanese invasion in the mid-1930s, however, neither plan amounted to much as China was simply too poor and politically unstable to make either Rockefeller's or Savage's dreams come true.

But when the CCP took power in October 1949, the new government immediately embarked on a major economic construction effort, putting dramatic increases in electrical generation at the core of China's Soviet-inspired economic planning system.(16) Despite the extensive disruptions and economic and political setbacks brought about by the ill-fated Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, large-scale energy production in thermal plants and other electrical...