May 18, 2006
I’ve been Shanghaied
That’s better than I was earlier, when we were on the Yangtze.
There, I went to hell. Many have told me that’s where I should go, but the boat stopped at Fengdu, whi
ch has a “ghost city,” that includes hell. There were all sorts of Taoist spirits–including one that deals with wine–I pictured some of the fraternity boys there! I stopped there 8 years ago, when I took my first Yangtze trip, and there was still a city there. Since then, the river has risen due to the impoundment created by the three gorges dam, and the 150,000 people have been relocated to the south bank, the old city destroyed and removed.
That is kind of a metaphor for what has happened with the three gorges project, a massive 22 billion dollar project that will flood about 300 miles of river valley and make it possible for ocean transports to reach from Shanghai to Chongqing. One thing it has 
already done is cause the city of Ichang (where we disgorged, so to speak) to increase tenfold—from 400,000 to
a “small” Chinese city of 4 million.
The Chinese sometimes remind me of teen-aged boys. If you tell them no, or you cannot do it, they will. That is certainly the case with the dam and the massive resettlement it has caused. About a third of the population of China lives along the Yangtze, most of them downriver from the dam. The dam will provide electricity (5-10 per cent of China’s needs), flood control (a major problem in the past), a transportation artery into the interior, and–this was new to me–a potential source of water for the parched north (including Beijing, which has major shortfalls in water supply). The world said, it is environmentally unsound to build the dam, and you lack the technology, etc. 12 years later, the dam is in place, and it will be fully functional in two years.