Corruption Charges Again Rock Dam Project

The world’s largest public works effort, China’s Three Gorges Dam, has been hit by a fresh wave of corruption charges that further call into question the wisdom of the controversial project.

During the last 18 months, allegations of mismanagement and malfeasance have grown from a trickle into a steady flow of tales of massive corruption.

The latest allegations center on the head of a company involved in the construction, the Three Gorges Economic Development Corp. Company boss Jin Wenchao was reported by a Hong Kong newspaper this week to have disappeared, along with more than $120 million, some of which was transferred to overseas bank accounts, the South China Morning Post said.

Jin, a former soldier, allegedly got the money by selling jobs in his company and taking out loans supposedly in support of the $24-billion dam, which is under construction in central China along the mighty Yangtze River, the world’s third-longest waterway. Jin’s son and daughter also have been accused of acquiring loans to set up fictitious businesses, reports said.

The allegations could not be confirmed Thursday, the middle of a weeklong holiday in China to mark International Labor Day on May 1. Chinese officials are generally tight-lipped about scandals concerning the dam, a hydroelectric project pushed by the Communist regime as a symbol of national strength and know-how.

But state media recently have begun publicizing accounts of corruption in connection with the project, an indication of the alleged fraud’s seriousness and magnitude.

In January, the People’s Daily--the Communist Party mouthpiece--revealed that state auditors had implicated at least 14 people in a $57-million embezzlement ring to siphon funds earmarked for resettling residents displaced by the dam. One of the suspects in the case has been sentenced to death.

That same month, a top executive with the project’s largest subcontractor was sacked for buying used, substandard equipment, including trucks and bulldozers, in a suspected $24-million kickback scheme.

And as far back as January of last year, the Chinese press reported that more than 100 project officials had been arrested on suspicion of malfeasance.

“It’s a cancer of corruption,” said Doris Shen of the Berkeley-based International Rivers Network, an organization that is highly critical of the dam.

“There are scapegoats being executed and sentenced to life” in prison, Shen said. “However, the people who have promoted and pushed this project . . . are not suffering any consequences whatsoever.”

The dam project, which began construction in 1994, is scheduled to be completed in 2009. It would stand 600 feet tall and generate 18,000 megawatts of electricity. More than 1 million people will have to be resettled.

Officials say the project is crucial to control disastrous summer flooding. Critics contend that the dam will be a financial, ecological and social nightmare.

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

The dam’s opponents also say that the Three Gorges project will achieve little in the way of flood control because of rapid sedimentation along the Yangtze and in the dam’s reservoir.

Just last month, a group of hydrologists, engineers and scholars submitted a petition to the government urging leaders not to fill the dam’s reservoir to capacity when it opens in order to give scientists time to monitor silting.

Reports of shoddy workmanship have plagued the project. In December 1998, a project official admitted that engineers had discovered defects such as weak concrete.