Three Gorges Dam - Pushing the Limits: New Adventures in Engineering - page 147

with the Three Gorges dam project stretches quite a ways down the Yangtze and is linked govern-
mentally directly to Beijing. Known to many westerners as Chungking, Chongqing is rich in history.
Located where the Jialing River flows into the Yangtze, the city was the capital of China from 1937
through 1943 and was headquarters of the Chinese nationalist armies. It was bombed by the Japan-
ese during World War II and served as an American air base in 1944 and 1945. A modest, aging, but
significant museum to General Joseph W. Stilwell commemorates his command of all U.S. forces
in the China-Burma-India theater from 1942 to 1944. The Three Gorges Dam is expected to bring
renewed prominence to the city.
Our delegation's last official stop was Beijing, where we met with a group of professors from the
Institute of Geography and Natural Resources of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Members of
this research and graduate-training institute had long been involved with the problems associated
with filling the reservoir of the Three Gorges Dam, and the group that met with us gave what ap-
peared to be a frank and realistic appraisal of how the problems were being dealt with. It had been
recognized early in the planning stages for the dam that hundreds of thousands of people would
be displaced. Part of the discussion centered around exactly what the number was, for some of the
delegates had heard numbers as high as two million. According to the researchers, the number at
the beginning of the project was about eight hundred thousand. Higher numbers resulting from such
factors as the growth of population were expected to bring the actual number when the dam is com-
pleted and the reservoir is full to about 1.3 million, we were told. The researchers seemed to ap-
preciate the plight of these people but stated that the greater good for the larger Chinese population
justified going ahead with the dam. This was the bottom-line conclusion of the admittedly small
sample of people we met and spoke with, formally and informally, in China.
We spent several days in Beijing and its environs, which enabled us to visit Tian'anmen Square,
the Forbidden City, the Great Wall, and other tourist attractions. The scale of each of these is enorm-
ous, like that of the Three Gorges Dam. Perhaps it is in the nature of a country with a population
estimated at 1.3 billion to build on a massive scale, even if in the process one in a thousand of its cit-
izens is displaced. Great projects have great consequences—good and bad—no matter where they
are built.