Deng’s Failing Health Gives Boost to Huge Dam Project : China: Builders want a head start before succession issue arises. Bitter debate over Three Gorges continues.

Viewed from a boat in the center of the Yangtze, the construction work on the banks of the great river appears massive and urgent.

On the south bank, giant earthmovers clear the path for the diversion channel that will carry the river’s flow and boat traffic while the Three Gorges Dam is being built.

On the north bank, workers dynamite canyon-sized grooves in hillsides, building a stepladder of massive locks that will allow seagoing ships to climb over mountains on their way into central China.

If completed as planned, the 600-foot-high, $20-billion Three Gorges Dam will be the biggest hydroelectric project ever built. Communist leaders trumpet the dam as China’s biggest public works effort since the Great Wall.

After nearly 70 years of national dreams and discussion--including a rare, bitter public debate in the National People’s Congress--Chinese Premier Li Peng traveled to the construction site at Sandouping, 20 miles west of Yichang, to officially launch the dam project in December.

Since then, the project’s 18,000 workers have toiled night and day. At night, headlights from convoys of trucks form a ribbon of light on both sides of the river.

The underlying reason for the urgency is the failing health of 90-year-old senior leader Deng Xiaoping. Despite approval by the National People’s Congress in 1992, the project’s future is still subject to bitter divisions of opinion among Chinese leaders. Strongly identified with Li, a Soviet-trained hydraulic engineer and leader of the hard-line faction in the Communist Party, the Three Gorges Dam is likely to become a political issue again in the post-Deng era.

The dam builders, working at a furious rate, want as much of a head start as possible before the political succession battle begins following Deng’s death.

Hoping to have the first phase of the project completed by 1997, to coincide with the return of British Hong Kong to the Chinese mainland, the engineers jumped the gun on the project start date by more than a year, infuriating the dam’s opponents.

“I don’t care how much work has been done, the fight over the Three Gorges Dam is not over yet,” vowed a retired senior official who maintains a strong interest in the project.

Li acknowledged the political challenges to the project when he spoke at the dam dedication. Standing on a sandbag stage overlooking a construction pit, he pledged that with the support of the Communist Party central leadership, “no difficulty will beat us. . . . By 2009 (the project’s completion date), a magnificent Three Gorges project will stand rock solid in the great land of China.”

Since the beginning of the century, some Chinese have dreamed of damming the Yangtze downriver from the 120-mile stretch of steep, narrow canyons known as the Three Gorges to produce electricity and control flooding. It was first proposed as a national project by Sun Yat-sen, the founder of modern China, in 1920.

Engineers have long been fascinated by the setting’s challenge and potential. Dam builders with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation worked with the Chinese to come up with a design in the 1940s. Soviet engineers arrived to pick up their work in the 1950s.

In his novel “A Single Pebble,” author John Hersey writes of a young American engineer who comes to China in the early 1920s to research a dam site. “Being an ambitious young engineer, I could only think of (the Yangtze) as an enormous sinew, a long strip of raw, naked, cruel power. I had much yet to learn,” the young engineer-narrator says as he recalls his exploratory trip up the Yangtze.

Despite devastating floods on the lower Yangtze--which have killed 300,000 people in this century--the idea of damming the river the Chinese call “the Great” has never been without fierce opposition here. Even in the darkest days of conformist, Maoist China, the dam had vocal opponents, including Li Rui, one of Mao Tse-tung’s personal secretaries.

The Three Gorges hydroelectric project is opposed by environmentalists inside and outside China who argue that the dam will flood one of the world’s great natural sites, destroy habitats of rare species such as the giant Chinese river sturgeon and obliterate cultural landmarks dating to the legendary era of the Three Kingdoms (circa AD 200).

Dai Qing, a prominent engineer-journalist, was imprisoned without trial for 10 months because of her opposition to the project.

But the dam’s planners insist that the project will be built as designed. “There is no turning back,” Lu Youmei, general manager of the Three Gorges Development Corp., said in an interview in his Hubei province headquarters in Yichang. “The Chinese government is determined to build the dam.”

Environmentalists disagree, pointing to the recent last-minute withdrawal of World Bank funding for India’s Narmada Valley Dam project as proof that even giant public works projects can be turned around.

At a minimum, environmentalists contend, China should follow India’s example and reduce the project’s scale, perhaps building a series of smaller dams on Yangtze tributaries. For the moment, World Bank officials have said they are not interested in backing Three Gorges.

“Not until the tail waters of the reservoir are lapping up against the piers in Chongqing (a major city about 300 miles west in Sichuan province) can you say that this project has reached a point of no return,” said Jim Harkness, a Cornell University environmental sociologist who has studied the Three Gorges project.

The most daunting challenge faced by dam builders is how to move and resettle 1.2 million people who live in 13 cities and towns that will be flooded by the giant reservoir created by the dam.

Most of the historic city of Fengdu, a tourist trap known as “Ghost City” because of its gaudy temples honoring the “King of Hell” and other underworld gods, will be submerged under 580 feet of water. Its 40,000 residents will be moved to a new city that will be constructed on the opposite riverbank.

For this reason, Fengdu and the other targeted cities have been left in development limbo. Rare in economically booming China, there is not a construction crane in sight. There is not a fresh coat of paint in town. The Ghost City is destined to become a ghost town.

“Most of the young people are looking forward to the move, especially if it means they will get new apartments,” said Li Xiaohong, 24, a Fengdu travel guide. “But many of the older people don’t want to move.”

In the major city of Wanxian, more than 700,000 of the town’s 1.2 million inhabitants will be forced to move; 900 factories are below the projected water line.

No other dam project in history has faced such a huge relocation challenge. Even the Narmada Valley project in India is now expected to displace not more than 100,000 people. Lu, the Three Gorges manager, agrees that the resettlement of so many people is a major headache. But he justifies it on the grounds of the flood control, disputed by environmentalists, that he claims the dam will provide.

“Of course, the project will inundate a certain area along the bank,” Lu said. “More than 1 million people will have to be resettled, but more than 20 million will be protected from flooding. In a way, we will disrupt 1 million to protect 20 million.”

But in the end, it may be economic rather than environmental and political factors that make the difference in the future of the Three Gorges Dam. China admits that it has at least a $3-billion shortfall in financing the dam. With the World Bank on the sidelines, no one else has stepped forward to fill the gap.

After attempts to attract foreign capital failed, the government assessed an electric rate increase on all Chinese people, except for certain minority populations. In some cases, this surcharge will amount to more than 25%. This has stirred new opposition to the dam in remote corners of China where residents complain that they are being asked to pay for a project that will provide electricity to already rich Shanghai and the lower Yangtze valley.

Other revenue has been diverted from the electric production of Gezhouba Dam, a smaller hydroelectric project near the Three Gorges Dam site. Gezhouba Dam, which produces 15 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity annually (compared with Three Gorges’ projected 85 billion kilowatt-hours), is often held up as an example of a highly successful project.

But it is also an example of how politics in China sometimes interferes in public works plans. In the tumult and hysteria of the Cultural Revolution, former Premier Chou En-lai was forced to suspend construction of the dam for years.

As for the Three Gorges project, its size and expense also have turned Yichang and other areas downriver into boom towns.

But upstream in the impoverished river towns that will be flooded by the giant dam, people have mixed reactions.

Dai Zhengyuan, 64, steered his motorized sampan up the swift-moving Daning River--a tributary of the Yangtze--encountering only a few small villages, goats and hillside potato fields. Interviewed on his craft, Dai said he was not too concerned about the dam, figuring he would just move.

As he talked, an occasional sampan, load with drying stacks of medicinal herbs, passed by. River porters, pulling their craft against the current in the ancient Chinese way, with harnesses strapped across their chests, moved slowly upstream close to the bank.

Suddenly, an overpowering stench filled the air. There, on a steep hill ahead, was Chuang Long, a village of about 1,000 people in Sichuan province on a small scenic tributary of the mighty Yangtze River. Chuang Long, which means double dragon in Chinese, is one of those small, filthy river cities that you smell practically before you see.

In 10 years, if the Chinese government completes Three Gorges, Chuang Long will be 200 feet under water, inundated by the reservoir of the largest hydroelectric dam project in history. Like the others who will be flooded out of their homes by the project, the residents of impoverished Chuang Long have divided reactions to the watery annihilation of their town.

Younger people without job prospects or decent housing see hope in the government promise to build them a modern town up the hill or relocate them in cities where work is available. Older people, or those with good homes and businesses, see no advantage.

The resulting debate about the merits and threat of Three Gorges was played out the other day on one of the town’s narrow, muddy lanes. A restaurant owner was enthusing to a reporter about how happy she would be to leave Chuang Long’s fetid streets and crumbling buildings for a “new town” with modern apartments provided by the government. Overhearing this, another woman, who owns a larger, more prosperous restaurant across the lane, shouted that she is unhappy about moving.

“I have a good business and a good house,” she said. She raised her arm from the basin where she had been cleaning the bristles off a slab of pork fat and gestured into the spacious dining room with three heavy tables.

The debate continued in a general store next door where, amid aluminum pots and pans, two young girls who had left Chuang Long to work in Zhuhai, one of China’s new special factory zones in South China, told people how happy they were to be back home. The city job meant more money, they said. But they never realized how much they would miss their home village.

You don’t realize how much you miss your village, they said, even a muddy, stinky river town like Chuang Long, until it is no longer there.