Taming the River Wild

By SANDRA BURTON/YICHANG

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."

Chinese leaders argue just as vehemently that Three Gorges is vital to their country's future -- and actually good for the environment as a whole. They say it will prevent the periodic flooding that has claimed 500,000 lives in this century. More important, its production of clean hydroelectric power will reduce China's reliance on coal, the dirtiest of all fossil fuels, which now supplies 75% of the country's energy needs. The burning of coal has cast a pall of pollution over major Chinese cities and helped make pulmonary disease the nation's leading cause of death.

The issue is how a rapidly growing nation of 1.2 billion people, all of whom would like refrigerators and other conveniences, can promote economic development without wrecking its environment. For the Chinese government, hydropower in general and Three Gorges in particular are a big part of the solution. "The advantages outweigh the disadvantages," contends He Gong, vice president of the China Yangtze Three Gorges Project Development Corp.

How China meets its energy needs has an impact far beyond its boundaries. Sulfurous emissions from Chinese power plants and factories blow eastward and fall as acid rain on Japan and Korea. In fact, the pollution has planet-wide + implications: China is the world's second-largest producer of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that are collecting in the atmosphere and may, many scientists believe, lead to global warming. If China maintains its annual economic growth rate of 11%, the country will need to add 17,000 megawatts of electrical generating capacity each year for the rest of the decade. Within 10 years, that would be as much new power as the U.S. generates overall today. If China uses mostly coal to produce that power, the greenhouse effect could be catastrophic.

Many opponents of Three Gorges have no quarrel with the effort to move away from coal toward hydropower. But they argue that for a lower price, numerous smaller dams could produce more power and greater flood-control benefits. They fear that a dam so large on the notoriously muddy Yangtze will lead to dangerous buildups of silt in some parts of the river, creating new obstacles to navigation and causing floods upstream. Chinese officials respond that both big and small dams are needed. Indeed, 10 projects smaller than Three Gorges, with a total capacity of nearly 12,000 megawatts, are under construction on the upper reaches of the Yangtze and its tributaries.

Whether or not Three Gorges is ever finished, hydropower can never meet the bulk of China's energy needs. Part of the problem is that most of the potential dam sites are in the less populated southwestern part of the country, making it expensive to transmit electricity to the industrial north and east. Experts say hydropower will account for no more than 20% of China's electricity generation by 2010.

Nuclear plants are another clean power source, at least in terms of air pollution, but splitting the atom won't solve China's energy problems either. The government's controls on electricity prices and its failure to adopt international nuclear-safety standards have discouraged foreign investors from helping China build commercial reactors. Only two nuclear plants are in operation, and one of those was built to supply electricity mainly to Hong Kong at rates five times as high as what can be charged in China. Jiang Xinxiong, president of the China Nuclear Industry Corp., predicts that 20 more atom plants will be on line by 2020, but even so, nuclear power would meet less than 10% of China's energy needs.

That leaves no way around a heavy dependence on coal. The best China can hope for, say experts, is to cut coal's portion of the energy mix from 75% to 60% by 2010. The imperative, then, is to find cleaner, more efficient ways to burn the plentiful fossil fuel, reducing emissions of carbon dioxide, sulfur compounds and the incompletely combusted particles that form soot.

To begin with, the Chinese have mounted a successful campaign to equip major coal-burning factories and power plants with devices that wash the fuel. That has reduced the soot pouring out of the largest smokestacks but has hardly begun to clear the air. Reason: the main sources of pollution are millions of small factory boilers and household stoves burning unwashed coal. While the government hopes that as much as half the urban population can eventually be supplied with clean natural gas for cooking, rising prices and short supplies may undercut that effort.

One of the most costly -- and crucial -- steps in cleaning up coal boilers is curbing sulfur emissions. They combine with water in the atmosphere to create sulfuric acid and thus produce acid rain. Yet only one Chinese power plant boasts desulfurization equipment. China Huaneng Group, the market- oriented Chinese company that built the plant, was able to cover the cost of installing the antipollution devices only because the government agreed to raise electricity rates to users, according to Huaneng president Wang Chuanjian.

Even if coal is burned cleanly and efficiently, it produces large amounts of carbon dioxide, the most common greenhouse gas. To help ease the threat of global warming, China might use new technology to convert a portion of its coal reserves to natural gas, which delivers much more energy for the amount of CO2 released. The process, though, is expensive. The U.S. Department of Energy asked Congress this year for a $50 million grant that would be earmarked to help China build a demonstration coal-gasification power plant, but the appropriation has not been approved. By contrast, Japan is underwriting an environmental center in Beijing as a showcase for antipollution technology.

Clearly, China needs a great deal more financial help to develop clean energy sources. Mou Guangfeng, a deputy director in the National Environmental Protection Bureau, estimates that the country needs $300 billion just for antipollution equipment. Yet the usual sources of aid, foreign governments and international lending agencies, are running dry; the World Bank alone has poured $20 billion into all sorts of China projects and can't do much more.

The only solution may be to bring in private capital from abroad by floating stocks and bonds, and Western bankers are ready to help. Says Ray Spitzley, executive director of Morgan Stanley Asia in Hong Kong: "China has evolved into a credit-worthy country that can tap world markets." Maybe so, but the poor showing of the few stocks traded internationally has made investors skittish. Eager to make their securities more attractive, Chinese officials are talking with the World Bank about setting up a Chinese National Power and Development Fund that would sell bonds backed by the bank to private investors.

While foreigners may be justifiably reluctant to help finance a project as audacious and controversial as Three Gorges, many indisputably worthy ventures, from coal gasification to experiments with solar power, are also begging for funds. Governments and investors naturally wonder if they can afford to gamble on China. But as the most populous nation threatens to pollute the entire planet, can the rest of the world afford to turn its back?

With reporting by Jaime A. FlorCruz and Mia Turner/Beijing