Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
China may eventually drop by almost half if current erosion trends are
not halted. Every year illegal logging and slash-and-burn agriculture
consume up to 5,000 square kilometers of virgin forest. Over the
past two decades, forest cover in central and northern China has been
reduced by almost half. The problem has become so serious that
the Chinese government has instituted a credible program of reforesta-
tion and has begun teaching the Chinese public about its importance.
A massive reforestation project is currently underway in the Yangzi
watershed.
China is already at least 20 percent desert, and it loses thousands
more square miles of land each year to desertification, a major
environmental crisis in China with root causes traceable mainly to
deforestation and overgrazing perpetrated during Mao's rule. Desert-
ification is now double what it was in China during the 1950s, when
Mao's rule began. Old deserts are expanding and new deserts are
forming. Ironically, Mao's most enduring influence on China may not
turn out to be his revolutionary ideology, relentless promotion of class
struggle, or rash attempts at leapfrogging of Marxian stages of histori-
cal development, but rather the environmental degradation inflicted
on China by his headlong rush to control and exploit nature.
D. The Three Gorges Dam
The Three Gorges Dam, located on the Yangzi River in Hubei prov-
ince, is a massive hydroelectric dam at the town of Sandouping, about
halfway between the major Yangzi River cities of Chongqing and
Wuhan. It is the world's largest dam, hydroelectric or otherwise. It
was first proposed around 1920 by Sun Yat-sen and later endorsed by
Chiang Kai-shek, and Mao Zedong, ever the romantic warrior fighting
against the Japanese, the Chinese Nationalists, and nature itself, rhap-
sodized poetically about the project. Its construction was authorized in
1992, and since that time it has proven extremely controversial.
The dam was completed in 2006 and began producing hydroelectric
power soon thereafter, although its full electrical generating potential
will probably not be achieved until sometime in 2011. Over the course
of its construction, one million residents had to be removed because of
the large man-made lake created by the dam, and several important
archaeological and cultural sites were flooded out. Environmentalists
began sounding the alarm about silting and other ill effects of dam-
ming up the Yangzi, but in China, where political will trumps environ-
mental concerns along with everything else, concerns about the dam's
