The slopes of Chenjialing Village have shuddered and groaned lately, cracking and warping homes and fields and making residents fear the banks of China's swelling Three Gorges Dam may hold deadly perils.
The vast hydro scheme is meant to subdue the Yangtze River, but as the water levels rise, parts of its shores have strained and cracked, dismaying scientists and officials and alarming villages such as Chenjialing in Badong County.
Xiang Chuncai, who has lived much of her 84 years on this hillside of orange groves above the Yangtze, recalled waking in fright last year to rattling windows and rumbling noises from the earth. The tremors returned several times in past months, residents of this village in Hubei province said.
"It's all been splitting since the Three Gorges Dam was filled," Xiang said, poking a wide crack snaking up a wall in her earth-brick home. "We don't have the money to move ... I'm scared what will happen if we stay."
Along the 660km reservoir, residents pointed to erosion, slides and deformed terrain they said had seriously worsened since last year, when the water level was raised a second time.
While authorities have vowed to contain geological aftershocks from the dam, poor farmers worry about being swallowed up by landslides. The resulting tensions threaten to rekindle the bitter clashes that long dogged the project.
"Sometimes the ground rumbles and shakes, dogs bark, babies cry. It frightens us too," said Xiang's neighbor Su Gongxiang, showing his front door that will no longer shut.
These days, China stands almost alone among nations in wielding the wealth and will to conjure up vast engineering efforts to alter the flow of rivers and lives of millions.
The Three Gorges Dam is the world's biggest, an engineering feat that seeks to tame the world's third longest river while displacing 1.4 million people.
The 6,300km Yangtze, which rises on the Tibetan plateau, flows through the towering Three Gorges to irrigate, and often flood, much of the country's vast central and eastern plains.
Starting in 1919, a succession of leaders argued that a dam would end devastating floods and generate power. That dream eluded the revolutionary founder Mao Zedong, whose plans for a dam foundered in political turmoil and poverty.
TROPHY PROJECT
But in the 1980s a new generation of Communist Party leaders championed the plan as a trophy of growing economic power.
They faced down opposition from environmental critics and skeptical scientists, who in 1992 persuaded an unprecedented third of the usually docile Party-controlled parliament either to oppose the plan or to abstain.
Construction began in 1994.
Since the 2,309m-long dam was finished in 2003, the reservoir has been filled with water in stages. If all goes by plan, it will reach its maximum capacity of 39.3 billion cubic meters of water by the end of 2008, capping a year of national glory centered on the Beijing Olympics.
But in Chenjialing this engineering triumph has brought bewilderment and the resigned anger that comes easily to people with little say over their own lives.
Its 1,400 villagers live above what was once a rivulet that could be waded across. These days it is a deep inlet that can moor big coal boats plying the Yangtze.
Everywhere among the fruit groves and potato fields is evidence of a bruised and unsettled landscape.
A hulking old tree has begun to tilt riverward, a nearby earth terrace suddenly subsided, and many houses show cracks and warping, all since last year, villagers said.
"We worry about staying but can't move," said Su Zhonghen, washing clothes in an outdoor stone sink that now skews to one side. "Only families with flooded homes get compensation."
A nearby bank of the Yangtze collapsed last year, tossing several homes into the water, and the county government has put signs around Chenjialing warning of "geological hazards."
The coal mine at the foot of the village probably does not help, with its dynamite blasts regularly shaking the quiet air.
Residents said they had been visited by a handful of worried but lowly officials who said there was little else they could do.
Tan Lianyong, a 45-year-old farmer who also works in the mine, said he worried that land slips could trap him in a tunnel.
"We're just peasants. We've got to earn money to survive. We can't choose how," he said, eyeing the vegetable patch in front of his home that suddenly sank in the middle.
The dam region is granite-solid in parts but also spans brittle terrain. Scientists have long forecast greater instability as rising and falling dam waters punch at shorelines, block seepage and squeeze weak spots.
"The dam area was always prone to landslides, and now the raising of water levels is adding to the pressure on the sides," said Lei Hengshun, an environment expert at Chongqing University.
The raised water loosened vulnerable layers of earth and rock, and drought and torrential rain could intensify risks of major land collapses, he said.
The slope of Qianjiangping Village in Zigui County, Hubei, suggests some the dangers these shocks may bring.
LANDSLIDE
In July 2003, after the dam began to fill, a landslide there killed 24 people and left 1,100 homeless, churning a whole hillside into a jumble of rock and earth and shattered homes.
State media said at the time the dam was not to blame, and torrential rain had at least played a part, experts said.
But villagers nearby said they feared that as waters rose again, landslide monitors would be unable to give enough warning.
"The first sign will be cracks in the older homes, like ours," said a former resident of Qianjiangping, Wang Aihua, visiting his parents there. "Keep your eyes open for anything like that," he told them.
In the rainy summer of 2007, landslides across the dam area killed at least 13 people, according to local news reports and the dam environmental agency.
A Xinhua news agency report last year cited over 1,900 geological hazards around the dam, including 362 urgently needing safety work. Thirteen had received it.
Scientists in state institutes have suggested that officials in charge of the project did too little to anticipate the dangers.
"The scale and intensity of these problems seems to have exceeded predictions," said Liu Changming, a hydro-engineer at the Chinese Academy of Sciences with long involvement in the dam.
Alarm at the top is growing too.
In April, Premier Wen Jiabao (
In September, a senior project official warned that land upheavals could spell "environmental calamity" -- an abrupt switch from bright propaganda about the dam's benefits.
Since then, officials have softened their warnings and said the hazards are well under control, pointing to billions of yuan already spent to control risks.
DANGEROUS LAND
Yet despite their assurances, the reality on the ground leaves little doubt that many thousands of farmers, if not more, must either move away or risk living on dangerous land.
Abrupt efforts to uproot endangered villagers, however, threaten to rekindle the bitter clashes between officials and the dispossessed residents that marred the construction of the dam.
In Kangle Township, villagers described an angry meeting with local officials after receiving notice early last month urging them to voluntarily move by the end of the year or risk landslides.
The compensation offered was not enough for them to build new homes, and moving high in the hills would put them too far from their fields and water sources, villagers complained.
"If we don't move, we're scared of landslides, but if we want to move, we can't afford it," said farmer Jin Shihe.
On the other side of the valley, cracks have spread in homes, but residents said they had not received any notice to move.
"At night if it's raining, you don't dare go to sleep," said Li Zhongchen, a grandmother in her 60s. "If a landslide comes, it will be without much sound or warning, so you can just try to listen and wait."
Two sets of economic data released last week by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) have drawn mixed reactions from the public: One on the nation’s economic performance in the first quarter of the year and the other on Taiwan’s household wealth distribution in 2021. GDP growth for the first quarter was faster than expected, at 6.51 percent year-on-year, an acceleration from the previous quarter’s 4.93 percent and higher than the agency’s February estimate of 5.92 percent. It was also the highest growth since the second quarter of 2021, when the economy expanded 8.07 percent, DGBAS data showed. The growth
In the intricate ballet of geopolitics, names signify more than mere identification: They embody history, culture and sovereignty. The recent decision by China to refer to Arunachal Pradesh as “Tsang Nan” or South Tibet, and to rename Tibet as “Xizang,” is a strategic move that extends beyond cartography into the realm of diplomatic signaling. This op-ed explores the implications of these actions and India’s potential response. Names are potent symbols in international relations, encapsulating the essence of a nation’s stance on territorial disputes. China’s choice to rename regions within Indian territory is not merely a linguistic exercise, but a symbolic assertion
More than seven months into the armed conflict in Gaza, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to take “immediate and effective measures” to protect Palestinians in Gaza from the risk of genocide following a case brought by South Africa regarding Israel’s breaches of the 1948 Genocide Convention. The international community, including Amnesty International, called for an immediate ceasefire by all parties to prevent further loss of civilian lives and to ensure access to life-saving aid. Several protests have been organized around the world, including at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and many other universities in the US.
Every day since Oct. 7 last year, the world has watched an unprecedented wave of violence rain down on Israel and the occupied Palestinian Territories — more than 200 days of constant suffering and death in Gaza with just a seven-day pause. Many of us in the American expatriate community in Taiwan have been watching this tragedy unfold in horror. We know we are implicated with every US-made “dumb” bomb dropped on a civilian target and by the diplomatic cover our government gives to the Israeli government, which has only gotten more extreme with such impunity. Meantime, multicultural coalitions of US