Taming the River Wild

Monday, Dec. 19, 1994 By SANDRA BURTON/YICHANG

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Midway between its icy source in Tibet and the fertile delta at its mouth in Shanghai, 3,900 miles to the east, China's Yangtze River hurtles through a series of sheer chasms known as the Three Gorges. Legend has it that the scenic channel was carved in stone by the goddess Yao Ji as a way of diverting the river around the petrified remains of a dozen dragons she had slain for harassing the peasants. Over the centuries painters and poets have idealized the canyons as a mist-shrouded wilderness. While that may have once been true, the region lost much of its majesty in modern times, as demolition teams blasted rocky obstructions from the river's course, and the bucolic villages on its banks gave way to grim new factory towns.

Now both visions of the Three Gorges -- the ideal and the real -- are about to be consigned to a watery grave. Later this month, Chinese Premier Li Peng will preside over the symbolic first pouring of concrete in what is intended to be the world's largest hydroelectric dam. Already, mammoth earthworks on both banks of the construction site have begun to constrict the flow of the river where it gushes forth from the Xiling Gorge. Over the next 14 years, if all goes as planned, first an earthen coffer dam and then a 200-yd.-high concrete spillway and adjacent set of ship-lifting locks will block the swirling channel, transforming the Three Gorges into a single deep and currentless reservoir. Covering everything from ancient temples to contemporary slag heaps, the water will flood 28,000 acres of farmland and 20 towns and drive 1.4 million people from their homes.

The gigantic Three Gorges project has inspired awe and opposition ever since it was first proposed 75 years ago by modern China's founding father, Sun Yat- sen. During the 1980s the dam plan became a favorite target of pro- democracy dissidents. It was not until 1992, three years after the critics were brutally silenced in Tiananmen Square, that the communist rulers rammed the project through the National People's Congress. Even today, as construction finally gets rolling, the dam still draws fire from environmentalists around the world. To opponents, it is a symbol of mankind's monstrous interventions in nature, an enterprise that will not only displace people but also devastate wildlife and alter the landscape forever.

Powerless to block Three Gorges, critics hope it will be at least slowed by inadequate financing. They are urging governments and private investors to withhold the $3 billion in foreign loans and investments that the Chinese are seeking to help build the $30 billion dam. Says Dai Qing, a Chinese opponent of the dam who won a Goldman Environmental Prize last year, and is now a visiting scholar at the Australian National University: "I hope that people all over the world who love the environment and who love China will band together to stop this disastrous project."