DEVELOPMENT-CHINA: Corruption Claims Rise Around Three Gorges Dam

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Antoaneta Bezlova

BEIJING, Jul 25 2000 (IPS) - The world’s largest hydro-electric dam, China’s Three Gorges Dam, has been bombarded with letters of protest and criticism in a country where public discussions are few and far between.

In a sign of rare civil defiance, last week 53 senior Chinese engineers and academics petitioned the government for a second time this year, warning that the megaproject is beset with technical and economical problems.

The letter of protest warns President Jiang Zemin that Three Gorges dam officials are courting disaster by altering the the initial operating plan of the dam, whose construction began in 1994.

In a bid to maximize power output from the dam and offset its huge construction cost, officials in charge are planning to fill the reservoir within the first six years of operation.

According to the petitioners, this move violates a 1992 resolution by the National People’s Congress, China’s parliament, which promised to keep the reservoir low for an initial period of 10 years.

Raising the water level within the first six years would increase the resettlement burden of the project, forcing a “staggering number of 500,000 people” out of their homes, says the petition.

It would also block navigation at the Yangtze River, where the dam is under construction, by increasing siltation at the Chongqing port.

The Yangtze is the world’s third longest waterway and is near the city of Chongqing, Sichuan province. The project, expected to be completed in 2009, should generate 18,000 megawatts of electricity.

The original operating plan, which envisaged a low-level reservoir, would still generate benefits while dramatically cutting costs, argued the petition written by Lu Qinkan, a retired Ministry of Water Resources engineer.

Respecting the original plan would spare the government the costly and difficult task of displacing half a million people. The project is expected to involve the resettlement of some 1 million people.

Using the original scheme could also save three county seats, four large factories, and many cultural and historical sites from submergence.

“This is our second petition urging the central government to respect the 1992 resolution,” the letter states firmly, putting forward evidence how in 1997 Three Gorges officials quietly changed the Parliament’s resolution regarding the dam’s operating plan.

This proof of malfeasance is the latest in a stream of allegations of mismanagement and rampant corruption that have plagued the dam during the last 20 months.

Even the tightly-controlled state media has begun leaking accounts of corruption in connection with the project, an indication of public suspicion about the controversial project.

In January, the ‘People’s Daily’, the Communist Party’s flagship newspaper, reported that state auditors had implicated at least 14 people in a 57 million U.S. dollar embezzlement ring to divert funds earmarked for resettling residents displaced by the dam.

Later, one of the suspects in the case was sentenced to death.

That same month, a top executive with the project’s largest subcontractor was charged with embezzling 24 million dollars by importing hundreds of used trucks, bulldozers, excavators and loading vehicles instead of new ones.

The most serious allegations of massive graft came just two months ago. The head of a company involved in the construction, the Three Gorges Economic Development Corp., was reported by a Hong Kong newspaper in May to have disappeared, along with more than 120 million dollars.

The Hong Kong-based ‘South China Morning Post’ revealed that Jin Wenchao, the company boss, got the money by selling jobs in his corporation and taking out loans supposedly in support of the Three Gorges Dam.

Jin’s son and daughter have also been accused of acquiring loans to set up fictive businesses, the report said.

Revelations of corruption swirling around the project follow earlier reports of shoddy workmanship. Last year, Premier Zhu Rongji described many bridges and related infrastructure for the dam as “tofu scum” and ordered them ripped out.

Just three years before the first phase of the 24 billion dollar dam comes into operation, experts are questioning more than ever before the wisdom of building the project.

A report by the Probe International in the end of 1999 foresees a “death spiral” of bankruptcy and stranded investment costs for the massive dam even before its final completion.

Already, estimates of the real cost of the dam project, which has spiraled as construction proceeds, reach as high as 70 billion dollars.

“Electric power from the dam will cost at least two times more than power from the new high-efficiency gas turbines and cogeneration plants,” predict the authors of the report.

This is aggravated by the fact China is experiencing a glut in electricity and new nuclear and thermal plants are scheduled to come on-line, making it even more difficult for the Three Gorges dam to sell the power it will produce.

Officials say the project is crucial to control disastrous summer flooding, which only last year destroyed 5 million homes.

But critics contend the dam will achieve little in the way of flood control because of rapid sedimentation along the Yangtze and in the dam’s reservoir.