THREE GORGES DAM

When we hear that 1.24 million people (out of 400 million who live nearby) were 'displaced' to make way for the Three Gorges Dam, the largest dam on earth, we imagine that they were thrown out on the street and left to fend for themselves. Not so. In fact, most of the cost of the dam went to building new homes and new towns for the people who had to move.

But to understand the emotions behind the dam we need to understand that the Yangtze River, "China's Sorrow" has killed more people than any other river in the world. It has flooded 1,000 times in recorded history. In 1887 it drowned two million people, in 1931 four million, and in 1938 one million lost their lives.

China's history is really the history of its rivers, and the Chinese people's amazing gift for cooperation was largely formed by the need to cooperate--often with people thousands of miles away--in order to avoid being drowned! The political significance of the dam is enormous: China's greatest heroes have been hydrological engineers, for this reason. And Hu Jintao, China's current President, is a hydrological engineer.

Today the dam is in full operation, producing close to its design capacity of 22.5 GW--enough to power 2 million Chinese homes.