40 DAYS AND 40 NIGHTS

Beijing rulers fearful of the people (Paul Lin, July 01, 2003, The Taipei Times)

Today, the people of Hong Kong are set to hold the biggest street demonstration since the territory's handover to China in 1997. According to a report in the Hsin Pao newspaper, the government has conducted a survey on the matter. The authorities were shocked to find out that 18 percent of the territory's residents said they would participate in the demonstration.

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao's trip to Hong Kong was moved ahead a day in order to avoid the demonstration and the embarrassment. Wen will not get to see the Hong Kong people's anger against Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa and his government. The organizers estimate that 100,000 people will show up for today's demonstration, but the authorities have made preparations for 200,000.

The demonstration is primarily aimed at the legislation mandated by Article 23 of the territory's Basic Law. Tung's government has stubbornly insisted on enacting the law, ignoring the opinions of residents and displaying an extremely thuggish and arrogant attitude. On top of this, the government has -- by its obstinacy and incompetence over the past six years -- caused Hong Kong to sink to the status of the worst-off among the "four Asian dragons." [...]

The seeds of the Hong Kong people's current predicament were sowed 20 years ago, when China and the UK started negotiations on the territory's future. At the time, the people were deprived of any opportunity to state their opinions. Beijing rejected the participation of residents' representatives in the negotiation, on the grounds that it opposed a "three-legged stool." Nor did Beijing allow the people to express their wishes through a referendum. The so-called "China experts" in Britain dared not oppose Beijing.

As a result, the opinions of the people were ignored. Six million Hong Kong residents were handed over to China's authoritarian regime along with the land.

Yet businesses and governments continue to delude themselves that China is a stable nation on the way to modernity.

MORE:
UNDERWATER: The world’s biggest dam floods the past (PETER HESSLER, JUNE 7, 2003, The New Yorker)

The idea of building a dam in the Three Gorges was conceived by Sun Yat-sen in 1919. After Sun’s death, in 1925, the vision was kept alive by dictators and revolutionaries, occupiers and developers, all of whom saw the project as an important step in modernizing the nation. Chiang Kai-shek promoted the idea, as did Mao Zedong. When the Japanese occupied parts of the river valley in 1940, their engineers performed surveys; when the Kuomintang regained control of China, officials from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation helped the Chinese continue the planning. After the Kuomintang was defeated, the Communists turned to the Soviet Union for technical assistance. But the Russian advisers left after the Sino-Soviet split in 1960, and during the political chaos of the next two decades the project was put on hold. (The dam’s history is explored in a recently published book, “Before the Deluge,” by Deirdre Chetham.)

By the time construction finally began, in 1994, the era of big dams had passed in most parts of the world. Both the United States government and the World Bank refused to support the project, because of environmental concerns. Many critics of the dam believed that one of its main goals—protection against the floods that periodically ravage central China—would be better served by the construction of a series of smaller dams on the Yangtze’s tributaries. Engineers worried that the Yangtze’s heavy silt might back up behind the Three Gorges Dam, limiting efficiency. Social costs were high: an estimated 1.2 million people would have to be resettled, and low-lying cities and towns would have to be rebuilt on higher ground. Once completed, the dam would be the largest in the world—as high as a sixty-story building and as wide as five Hoover Dams. The official price tag was more than twenty-one billion dollars, roughly half of which would be funded by a tax on electricity across China. [...]

In the new cities I rarely heard criticism of the dam. Even in rural areas, where people have received far fewer benefits, complaints tend to be mild and personal. Generally, people felt that they hadn’t received their full resettlement allowances, often because of the corruption of local Communist Party cadres. But those who complained almost never questioned the basic idea of the dam. When I asked Huang Zongming what he hoped his children would do when they became adults, he said he didn’t care, as long as they used their education and didn’t fish. He told me that the dam was “good,” because it would bring more electricity to the nation. In Wushan, I met a cabdriver who told me that his home town had leapfrogged a half century. “If it weren’t for the dam, it would take another fifty years for us to reach this stage,” he said.

But later in the same conversation he told me that the city wouldn’t last another half century, because of landslides. The new Wushan, which has a densely concentrated population of fifty thousand, is a vertical city: high buildings on steep hillsides that have never been heavily settled. Concrete erosion controls prop up many of the neighborhoods. The cabbie drove me to Jintan Road, where there had been a recent landslide. An apartment building had been evacuated; piles of dirt still pressed against the street. I asked the cabbie if he was concerned about the fifty-year limit. “Why worry about it?” he said. “I’ll be eighty by then.”

During my years along the Yangtze, I had always been impressed by the resourcefulness of the people, who responded quickly to any change in their surroundings. They took the revolution of the market economy in stride; if a product became available and was in demand, shops immediately stocked it. But there was almost no long-term planning. When people spoke of the future, they meant tomorrow.

One afternoon last year, I discussed this shortsightedness with Jiang Hong, a Chinese-born geographer who teaches at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She has studied communities in the deserts of northern China where generations of government policies have been implemented to convert the region into arable land. Many of these practices were environmentally unsound, and local residents generally resisted them. But she had noticed that in recent years there has been less opposition to such schemes, partly because free-market reforms gave people more incentive to try to change their environment. In the past, government campaigns often touted abstract goals, like the attempt to surpass the United States and Britain in steel production in the late nineteen-fifties. Such a target can inspire a peasant for only so long; nowadays everybody wants a better television set. And the lack of political stability has kept people from developing long-term expectations.

“Since 1949, policy has changed so often,” Jiang Hong told me. “You never knew what would happen. In the nineteen-eighties, people saw the reforms as an opportunity. And you had to seize the opportunity, because it might not last.”

Whenever I travelled along the Yangtze, I sensed that the dam’s timing was perfect, because the parallel drives of Communism and capitalism had bent just enough to intersect. Building the world’s biggest dam appealed to the dreams of the Communist leaders, but they never could have achieved it in the days of isolation and chaos, before the market reforms. And if the reforms had been around long enough for locals to get their bearings and look beyond satisfying today’s immediate desires, they would have questioned and possibly resisted the project. In the future, when people look back at China’s transition period, one of the lasting monuments may well be an enormous expanse of dead water in central China.

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 2, 2003 8:24 AM