Flood Deaths and Other Fables

Some years ago, in less reverent times than these, a British newspaper ran a contest among its editors asking for the most boring headline imaginable. “Small Earthquake in Chile--Not Many Dead” was the pitilessly worded winner. Political correctness would preempt such horseplay today, but if some bored copy desk workers were to ask the question anew, one leading candidate would be: “Great Floods in China: Millions Affected.”

In the past few months, there have been many such stories from the Celestial Kingdom. Because of the flooding on the Yangtze River, hundreds of hapless Chinese are reported to have been swept away and presumed dead. Scores of thousands more have been made homeless, and many millions of people have been “affected.” To most of us in the West, however, the story is barely noticed. There is something too commonplace, too faraway, too unimaginable about it all.

But there is a far better reason than simple apathy for giving little regard to these particular scenes from a modern Chinese tragedy. And this is that they all began as official pronouncements from the Beijing government, and they are almost certainly, to a very large extent, untrue.

The Yangtze has flooded this summer, just as it did last year and in all the summers of years and decades and centuries before. Some unfortunates will have had their houses swept away, no doubt, and a few--perhaps in Western terms, an unconscionably large number--have died. But there is nothing new or unusually dramatic in the floods of 1996, except insofar as the telling makes it so.

And in the telling, China has a purpose. It wants the sympathy of the world. Its government wants as much popular attention as possible turned to the raging of the Yangtze, its most unruly of rivers. China hopes for aid--blankets and gurneys and food rations--but also for something more important: international goodwill toward the one project that the regime insists can tame the river for all time, the construction of the notorious and ill-favored Three Gorges Dam.

What we are seeing now in all these supposed news stories is propaganda writ large, a cynical manipulation of statistics in order to convince a highly skeptical world that this wretched dam is a good idea.

I was on the Yangtze for much of last summer, traveling along almost all of the 4,000 miles between the sea and the Tibetan mountain ranges. By all accounts, the river was in full spate, and it was causing immense mayhem then as now. Chinese television had flooding as its lead story night after night. The BBC picked it up, spoke of millions affected. Friends to whom I placed telephone calls back home in New York were worried for me; the river was catastrophically dangerous, wasn’t it?

No, it wasn’t. It was high, of course. It always is in midsummer. But when I asked about flooding, each of the dozen or so ships’ captains with whom I sailed the various reaches looked down at the roiling waters and declared that the river was no fuller and no more dangerous than at any other time. The levees that had been built by the Americans in 1931--after the truly stupendous floods of that year--had held. In cities like Nanjing and Wuhan and Chongqing, there was some irritating low-level flooding, and I saw a few trucks up to their cabs in oily water. But that was all. Hundreds dead? Nonsense, said the skippers. And there was no evidence, anywhere.

When a Beijing television station reported on frantic efforts, “involving hundreds of heroic soldiers and patriotic volunteers” to protect an array of threatened lock-gates near Hankou, I happened to be close by and drove to have a look at them. There was nothing unusual. The locks were functioning. There was neither a soldier nor a volunteer in sight. Whatever was being promulgated by the official media was a total fabrication, a huge lie.

The Yangtze’s floods have for centuries posed immense hydrological problems. It was Sun Yat-sen, China’s first post-revolutionary leader, who first thought that a dam at Three Gorges would solve the problem, even if it ruined one of the country’s most beautiful places.

Since then, other schemes, such as the 1931 construction, have largely taken care of the problem. The proposed great dam is designed more for the generation of salable electricity than for any other purpose. Flood control had been steadily slipping down the list of stated justifications until last year. It was then that the Politburo decided it had to revivify the tragic willfulness of China’s great river to curry favor with an international community that seemed implacably set against the building of the dam.

Numerous reasons have been advanced for not building the dam: more than a million people to be forced from their homes, ruination of the gorges, siltation, the likelihood that the dam will not work and the certainty that it will cost too much. But at the forefront of the arguments are the recent revelations indicating that Chinese dams are shoddily and hurriedly built and all too often break.

Were that to happen with the Three Gorges Dam--the biggest in the world, by far--then there would be a headline to which we all would pay stunned attention: “Giant Dam Burst in China: Millions Dead.”