Beijing Newspeak

With a fortnight in the UK came an almost total (self-imposed and needed) disconnection from the China news mill and blogosphere. The sense of detachment was magnified by the fact news coverage over the Christmas period was of course dominated by Pakistan or Kenya. The two China-related stories I did stumble across when dipping into my real ale accompaniment of choice, The Guardian, were the beheaded tiger tale and news that the dam project at the Tiger Leaping Gorge had been scrapped.

In hindsight (a quick flick through Google News), it was remarkable that I managed to come into contact with the important and welcome announcement that one of the most visually stunning parts of China will not be submerged in Yangtze river water. The story sneaked past all the major news agencies busily preparing their year-end ”Best Of” pieces and appeared to be broken by the Guardian on December 29. Subsequently, it was picked up by United Press International and that’s about it in terms of news outlets. It goes to show what happens when the Big Three (AP, Reuters and AFP) are not on hand to spoon feed. Fortunately, blogging provided valuable assistance in spreading the word (shameless support of the craft I know, but it’s true) with Go Kunming and Shanghaiist following up.

In fact, the South China Morning Post broke the story more than a week earlier on December 20. The Hong Kong newspaper does itself no favours in terms of reputation by shielding its online stories behind a paywall. As a result, its ability to pick up regular exclusives is often overlooked. The Chinese Publicity Department’s favourite Tibetan website Phayul.com quotes chunks of the SCMP report though, drawing attention to the Yunnan provinicial government’s gag on the local media about the Tiger Leaping Gorge affair:

“Muzzled in its reporting of the controversial project over the past two years, local media have been told not to report the scrapping of the dam proposal,” SCMP noted.

On one hand, it seems strange the local government is so reluctant to play up the fact it has mulled over the deeply unpopular dam proposal, taken the local people’s concerns into consideration and decided for the good of mankind to ditch the idea. They wouldn’t even have to admit that the tourist revenue generated by the Tiger Leaping Gorge was a major factor in their decision. It is a sharp turnaround in intention. When I visited the gorge last April, the owner of Sean’s Guesthouse, located along the hiking trail, had already resigned himself to the project definitely going ahead and suggested the high population of bulldozers in the area was because of preliminary work on the dam - and not the huge quarry nearby.

However, given the local media have been prevented from discussing the project in recent years, it would be strange if the issue just popped up again in print. Also, any hint that the government has given into public opposition could be seized upon by the people living at the next proposed site. Phayul quotes SCMP as saying:

The new location, which had yet to be chosen from three options available, is expected to displace some 20,000 people; SCMP reported sources as saying.

As far as cold, hard figures go, 20,000 people beats the 100,000 set to be relocated by the Tiger Leaping Gorge dam. I wonder if all these 100,000 people actually know they are staying in the area. I remember some friends learning that a decision to replace their house with a new runway at Stansted Airport (recognised as London’s third airport - although a world away from London - for the benefit of non-UK readers) had been overturned through the Herts and Essex Observer. Yunnan residents, on this occasion, do not have such a luxurious form of communication.

Returning to Xinhua after a two-week break always brings the stagnancy of the office atmosphere back to the foreground. I’m relieved to be leaving although I cringed when I explained why I was abandoning a well-paid job to the taxi driver (he established my salary early on, which I halved out of embarrassment) who picked up me from my night shift yesterday. “I need a change,” I said. The guy drives taxis from 10am to 2am every day seven days a week and only sees his wife in bed between 2.30 am and 7.30am, when she gets up to go to work. That’s better than never seeing your wife in bed at all, but still.

Two stories grabbed my attention at Xinhua in recent days, the rest just drifted onto my screen and off to the releasers’ desk without me noticing I had edited them. The world’s media has naturally been spewing out Top Ten Moments of 2007 and thankfully Xinhuanet.com (Chinese version) was no exception. The popular news portal, as I think it is described, gave the country’s netizens the chance to vote for their favourite domestic news story of the year. Naturally, the Party Congress came in first.

BEIJING, Jan. 4 (Xinhua) — The successful staging of the 17th National Congress of Communist Party of China has been selected by the country’s netizens as the top domestic news in 2007, Xinhuanet.com said on Friday.

About 800,000 Internet users voted for news items on 38 major news websites across the country, including People.com.cn, China.com.cn, cctv.com and Xinhuanet.com.

“China succeeds in its first moon-probing mission” came second and “China’s National Congress passes Property Law” was the third, according to Xinhuanet.com, which posted the top ten news events on its website on Friday.

The major news events were selected by Internet users from a pool of 20 items, an executive with Xinhuanet.com told Xinhua. The executive declined to provide information on detailed voting results.

The top three international news stories were: “World oil price close to 100 U.S. dollars a barrel”, “U.S. sub-prime mortgage market crisis shakes global financial market” and “National theme years fuel momentum for Sino-Russian cooperation.”

Clearly the most important piece of information came in the fourth paragraph, which wasn’t included in the Chinese version. A “panel of experts”, chose their top 20 for netizens to get stuck into, removing any references to cardboard dumplings, fake tigers and the slave trade. What the story doesn’t mention is that voters were required to pick 15 out of the 20 provided for them. The 15 most popular choices were then rearranged according to the “panel’s” preference. Maybe Will Hutton was right to hyperbolise the Congress’ importance last October. Or maybe he wasn’t.

The other story of interest goes a long way in reflecting the comprehensive - and often insensitive - nature of China’s tourism drive in Tibet.

LHASA, Jan. 5 (Xinhua) — Tibetan authorities are beginning restoration work on former residences and office buildings of some of the first Communist Party members to be sent to Tibet in the early 1950s, which have been turned into “revolutionary” tourist attractions.

“The government has worked out a list of the revolutionary sites which need restoring and the second list is soon to be submitted,” said an official with the Tibetan Regional CPC Committee.

Money will be spent on sprucing up buildings used by the PLA as they “liberated” Tibet in 1951 and the site used for the first branch of the Communist Party in a Tibetan village in 1959. I feel the following line from a local official will be hard for the majority of Tibetans to swallow:

“By visiting the buildings, people can experience the hard times that their forefathers had to pull through and the sacrifices they made so that we can be inspired to treasure the peace and prosperity we have today.”

I remarked to the translator of this article that Tibetans would absolutely love that paragraph. Recognising that a foreigner was making a typically snide Tibet-related remark, she quickly snapped back, “Well it’s not for the native people and the majority of people in Tibet are Chinese, Han Chinese.” According to the census in 2000, 92.8 percent of the population of the Tibet Autonomous Region were Tibetan. It’s always worrying when some journalists have so little knowledge about a place they write about on an almost daily basis.

Over the weekend, a Beijing-based freelancer kindly bestowed upon me the secrets of how to succeed in the fickle, coldly commercial world that is journalistic self-employment. When in China, write about pandas, dragons and kung fu monks. I assumed it was an embittered joke but he did repeat it four times. Inspirational stuff, but while I still cling on to a scrap of idealism, I’m toying with the idea of taking a trip down to Poyang Lake in Jiangxi next month. China’s largest freshwater lake is fast approaching pond status thanks to a prolonged drought, with its surface area now down to 50 square kilometres from 3,000 square kilometres during the summer flood season. Its title should really be accompanied by a caveat: China’s largest freshwater lake - in July. The international media - specialist water publications aside - has mostly ignored Xinhua’s rumblings on the subject which might suggest I’m going to end up with unsellable copy. Should be interesting anyway.

One of the most frustrating aspects of being positioned in the polisher ranks - and therefore at the end of the editorial chain (barring the censors of politically sensitive content) - is the distance we are from the source of a story like the Poyang Lake yarn. It normally starts with a statistic provided by a provincial government department to an unquestioning local reporter (in a completely different department to mine and therefore not technically obliged to cooperate) that makes your eyes want to wrench themselves free of their sockets. In this case, it was the fact China’s largest lake is now 1.67 percent of its normal size during the summer - 50 square kilometres down from 3,000. For some much-needed perspective on this figure, it is essential to know that the surface area of Poyang Lake fluctuates spectacularly from summer to winter as discussed in this Science Daily article from 2005. However, the Science Daily report talks of a winter surface area of 1,000 square kilometres and Tan Guoliang, director of the Jiangxi hydrological bureau, told Xinhua that the area of the lake last winter was 300 to 500 square kilometres. In other words, it was up to ten times larger than the current figure.

Questions flood the mind. What does the dried-up lake actually look like? How is this affecting people around the lake? What are the long-term effects? What about the species that live in the lake? Instead of answers you reach the infamous seven-letter word that rounds off every Xinhua story. Enditem. A quick recap and the reaction to the statistic was encapsulated in a single paragraph all along:

The lake’s low water level has caused drinking water shortages for residents near the lake and affected industrial production. Local authorities are “taking all kinds of measures” to deal with the situation.

Several days of persistence later and the final product is acceptable. We have the long-term effects:

NANCHANG, Dec. 14 (Xinhua) — More than 100,000 residents are suffering drinking water shortages around the Poyang Lake, China’s largest freshwater lake, as drought strikes - and an expert has warned that the condition may blight the area for a further 10 winters, a direct result of climate change.

How local residents have been affected:

“My house used to be by the side of the lake. Now I have to go over a dozen kilometers away to get to the lake water. We have been used to the seasonal variations of the lake, but we have never been badly short of drinking water supply before,” said Yu Wenchang, a villager living in the northeastern part of the lake.

Some 1,000 villagers in Yu’s village of Xiayangzui in Changdu County of Jiangxi now live on water from four wells.

“A total of 52 of the 56 wells in the village have dried up, as the lake water retreats. Only four have water. Senior citizens told us that they had never seen the lake reduced so drastically in winter,” Yu said.

Villagers have channeled water from a nearby pond to the dry wells, and they are preparing to dig deeper for water.

Many villagers have abandoned the use of boats since they can walk across the marsh of the exposed lake bed.

The gloomy prediction:

Jiang Tong, an expert with the Nanjing Institute of Geography and Limnology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences said that the Poyang Lake’s winter drought is likely to continue for the next 10years.

“Both the stream flows into the river and the Yangtze River water to replenish the lake will be insufficient in dry seasons in the future, because of climate change and the exploitation of water resources,” said Jiang, who is a specialist in seasonal water responses to climate and land changes in Poyang Lake Basin.

But satisfaction remains elusive, probably as a result of witnessing the depressing absence of urgency in the reporting of the story and the lack of interest from the world media. Of course, startling embodiments of climate change are cropping up all over the world. I just happen to think the Poyang Lake case is particularly noteworthy. Xinhua reported at the beginning of the month that the water level of the lake is near its lowest in history. By the end of the dry season, it will surely set a new record. So what happens to the lake in ten years’ time when the Yangtze, its main benefactor, continues to be affected by drought and certain large-scale dam projects? Has the local government issued regulations on the industrial use of water from Poyang? China Dialogue has reported on the plight of the lake’s finless porpoises, which look like going the way of the Yangtze River dolphins (the 99.999-percent extinct baiji). Will their future be further endangered by the lake shrinkage? And what about the 50 million carp fry that were poured into the lake this summer to replenish fish stocks? It’s a bit like giving someone a free house with retractable walls that close in each day until there is less space than in a cell used for solitary confinement.

The news trickling out of Jiangxi coincides with reports that one million people are suffering the effects of drought in Guangxi as a result of the region’s worst drought since 1951. And then there was this devastating report (via the Globe and Mail) from Reuters at the end of last week which began:

BEIJING — China will have exploited all available water supplies to the limit by 2030, the government has warned, ordering officials to prepare for worse to come as global warming and economic expansion drain lakes and rivers.

As well, a state newspaper warned on Friday that drought next year could hit crops and stoke already heady inflation.

China’s surface and underground water supplies are under strain from feverish economic growth and a population passing 1.3 billion. And scarcity will worsen with global warming, the central government warned in a directive.

“In recent years economic and social development has led to increasing water demand, and with the impact of global warming, drought and water scarcity are increasingly grave”, said a directive issued by the office of the State Council, or cabinet, late on Thursday.

“Taking into full account water-saving, by 2030 our country’s water use will reach or approach the total volume of exploitable water resources, and the drought-fighting situation will be increasingly serious.”

The document on the government Web site (www.gov.cn) urges officials to make emergency plans for coping with drought and promises more spending on water-saving technology and artificial rain-making. Local governments must also develop policies to aid and compensate drought-hit farmers.

We can only make guesses about the appearance of Poyang Lake in 2030. Perhaps, as climatic extremes continue, China will end up with a lake fit to burst following severe summer flooding and a mere puddle during the winter months.

So the State Council only managed to last seven weeks before deciding the sound of open debate about the Three Gorges’ environmental problems was more unbearable than fingernails on a blackboard.

On September 25, at a forum in Wuhan, a statement was released to Xinhua - with the blessing of the State Council of course - detailing the true fears harboured by officials and experts involved in the project. Writing the headline to accompany the Xinhua copy was a liberating experience, given the waves of positivity that have been flowing from the Three Gorges publicity department in recent years. ”China warns of environmental ‘catastrophe’ from Three Gorges Dam”. The floodgates had been opened and the international media was guaranteed a field day.

The candid discussion about the Three Gorges project in September is widely believed to have been conducted for political purposes. By releasing this news ahead of the 17th Communist Party Congress, Hu Jintao and co could distance themselves away from a project that they inherited rather than implemented. The change in heart did deserve applause no matter whether or not it was engineered. Ecological ills can’t be repaired by denials. But it wasn’t much fun for the Three Gorges officials attending the congress. They entered the Great Hall of the People as fellow Party members sniggered behind their backs at the woeful job they had been doing.

Li Yong-an, deputy director of the Three Gorges Project Construction Committee, was one of the first to show discomfort at the public humiliation, beginning the backtracking on the sidelines of the Party congress in this report from Reuters.

BEIJING (Reuters) - Western media have exaggerated the landslides and deterioration in water quality that followed the start-up of China’s $25 billion Three Gorges dam, a senior government official said on Thursday.

“I was surprised when I read overseas reports of possible environmental catastrophes caused by the project,” said Li Yong-an, deputy director of the Three Gorges Project Construction Committee.

If in doubt, blame the foreign media. He must have forgotten that part of the statement approved for release from the September forum read like this:

“If no preventive measures are taken, the project could lead to catastrophe,” officials said.

On November 13, Reuters released a flood of news stories and features about the Three Gorges Dam. A series of headlines contained the words “disaster”, “fear”, “wrenching” and “strain”.  This Reuters story headlined “China’s rising dam brings wrenching exodus” was the kind of report that really irks my Chinese colleagues at Xinhua. It consisted of an interview with one couple who did not want to be relocated - the husband was sick and they didn’t own the house they were living in. They had no idea where they would go and how much (or little) compensation they would receive. A couple of colleagues I spoke to about this were not denying this should be reported but they argued there were other tales to tell. One colleague has a friend whose family was relocated from the Three Gorges area to Qingdao. They were given an apartment, jobs and places in school for the children. They were delighted they could now be called city people. But then news agencies have never had the luxury of the dying brand of “Slow Journalism” I was reading about in the Guardian the other day.  The New York Times, on the other hand, still does, as demonstrated by this superb story on the Three Gorges published yesterday.

The raft of foreign media reports, mostly from correspondents who had travelled around the Three Gorges area, spurred Wang Xiaofeng, director of the office of the Three Gorges Project Committee of the State Council, into action to save his face from being lost in the murky depths of the Yangtze. He contacted Xinhua to supply them with “an exclusive interview”. The story was written in English with no reference to the gloom and doom that surfaced at the September 25 forum, presumably in the hope a freak memory loss disease would cripple the globe and also tamper with the Xinhua database. The polisher cut and paste from the story released in September in order to supply some context to the about turn. The final editor dutifully deleted it.

The environmental impact of China’s Three Gorges dam has been less damaging than feared, a high-ranking Chinese official said on Thursday.

Speaking exclusively to Xinhua, Wang Xiaofeng, director of the office of the Three Gorges Project Committee of the State Council, said that “the (environmental) problems (of the dam), including landslides, trapped silt and algae blooms, did not go beyond the scope predicted by the feasibility report in 1991, and in some aspects, they are even less severe than predicted.”

“We are able to allow more silt than the designed volume to get through the dam, and no major geological disasters or related casualties have happened in the reservoir area since the water level was raised to 156 meters last year.”

“Some algae blooms did happen, but only temporarily in tributaries, and the main body of the water is kept above grade three as before,” he said.

Relocation of 1,570 businesses and 190,000 residents away from the reservoir has led to a substantial decrease in the amount of pollutants discharged, he added.

Remarkable really. The September 25 forum provided a platform for officials and experts to unleash worries that had been building up for years. It only took the State Council’s Three Gorges committee seven weeks to decide it wasn’t so bad after all.

I’m half expecting my task for today will be to trawl through the Xinhua database editing caveats about potential environmental damage into all the Three Gorges stories released since Hu Jintao came to power. Sounds like one of Winston Smith’s more rewarding days at the Ministry of Truth.

After years of positive spinning, the central leadership has come as clean as the Yangtze River was about 100 years ago about the environmental consequences of the Three Gorges Dam, admitting that if ”no preventive measures are taken, the project could lead to catastrophe”. Here are the opening few pars of the Times story:

It was hailed as one of the engineering feats of the 20th century. Now the Three Gorges Dam across China’s mighty Yangtze River threatens to become an environmental catastrophe.

In an unprecedented admission of blame, Communist Party officials gave a stark warning yesterday of impending disaster in the vast area around the dam if preventive measures are not urgently introduced.

For more than a decade China has promoted the world’s biggest hydro-electric project as the best way to end centuries of floods along the basin of the Yangtze and to provide energy to fuel the country’s economic boom.

The Government ignored critics who claimed that the Three Gorges, first proposed nearly a century ago and immortalised in a poem by Mao Zedong, was an ecological disaster waiting to happen.

Now those same officials who oversaw construction of the £13 billion dam admit that surrounding areas are paying a heavy, and potentially calamitous, environmental cost. Hundreds of thousands of people may have to be moved. A total of 1.3 million have been displaced by the dam already.

A report issued by the Xinhua news agency, mouthpiece for the Government, said: “There exist many ecological and environmental problems concerning the Three Gorges Dam. If no preventive measures are taken, the project could lead to catastrophe.”

The leadership should be applauded for a retreat that would impress a Long Marcher although the clapping shouldn’t quite reach fervent levels given the political nature of the announcement and the information that has been relayed through state media about the dam in recent years. As the Times article points out:

The timing of yesterday’s warning is significant, coming just two weeks before the Communist Party holds a five-yearly congress at which it will cement policy and anoint a new generation of leaders. One political analyst said: “It is a way for President Hu Jintao to distance himself [from the Three Gorges project] further. He stayed away from the completion ceremonies a year ago and this underlines that his administration does not want to be associated with the Three Gorges.”

If you look back at some of the Xinhua reports from the last two years the overall picture portrayed is more comic than a Marvel title. On May 19, 2006, this story was released with the confident headline, “Negative effects of Three Gorges project on environment under control: undertaker” and the tag of “China Exclusive” no less. (I have no idea why there were asking an undertaker for an opinion - perhaps they already realised the project was dead and buried. Sorry).

A few months later, in November of the same year, a report headlined “Water quality remains sound at Three Gorges Dam area” which opened:

Little water pollution has been detected at the Three Gorges Dam area since the water level of the gigantic dam reached the 156-meter mark on Friday, the latest monitoring reports show.

The dam area has maintained a sound ecological environment and water in the dam area is still potable, according to Hubei provincial government office in charge of water-pollution control in the Three Gorges Reservoir.

Leap forward to April, 2007 and this more realistic report was released, which conveyed a very different view through the first annual health report on the Yangtze River. The Three Gorges assessment was presented as a sideshow.

The report also assessed the Three Gorges Dam project, showing its huge reservoir is seriously polluted by pesticides, fertilizers and sewage from passenger boats.

China allocated 4 billion yuan (513 million U.S. dollars) in 2002 to offset the impact of the dam on the ecology, the local environment and the local people, said Prof. Weng Lida, former head of the Yangtze River Water Resources Commission, adding that more cash is coming.

“We have to take into consideration the proper settlement of the people who have been displaced, environmental protection, heavy silting and the prevention of geological disasters,” said Weng who cautioned that “faster is not always better.”

The water level in the Three Gorges reservoir reached a landmark 156 meters last October, but some provinces want the level to go higher so more electricity can be produced, Weng said.

“Higher water levels will worsen pollution and silting. We have to seek more sustained development,” he said.

It should be noted that Professor Weng Lida has always been the one advocating caution regarding the Three Gorges project. He was quoted by the Wall Street Journal at the end of August this year, warning of the problems facing the eco-system around the dam. Unfortunately subscription renders this story unlinkable but it has been summarised on this environmental website.

“We thought of all the possible issues,” environmental scientist Weng Lida, secretary general of the Yangtze River Forum, a coalition of the Chinese government and nongovernmental organizations, told the Wall Street Journal. “But the problems are all more serious than we expected.”

Amusingly, Xinhua tried to release a story a week later talking about the rosy situation on the banks of the reservoir - the reservoir where 36 km of shoreline has collapsed. I rejected it pending an ounce of balance and a reaction to the Wall Street Journal article. I regret that decision now as the story would have been nicely juxtaposed with yesterday’s announcement. In fact, the reaction to that Wall Street Journal article was reported yesterday by Xinhua, for which the agency journalist (naturally the only reporter at the Three Gorges forum earlier this week) deserves praise for getting some good quotes outside of the statement released with central government approval.

Commenting on the newspaper report, Wang said he thought most of the statements were said out of a concern for the Three Gorges Project, but some of the phrasing did reflect ulterior motives.

But he also admitted, “The problems mentioned in the Wall Street Journal should merit adequate attention from all of us.”

“Ulterior motives” aside, that is high praise indeed from a Chinese government official for a damning (excuse pun) report by foreign media.

So now that officials, scientists and the ubiquitous experts have been blinded by a great big flashing green light to pour forth tales of environmental woe, maybe we can expect progressively more shocking statistics such as this one from Xinhua:

Frequent geological disasters have threatened the lives of residents around the reservoir area, said Huang Xuebin, head of the Headquarters for Prevention and Control of Geological Disasters in the Three Gorges Reservoir.

At the forum he described landslides around the reservoir that had produced waves as high as 50 meters, which crashed into the adjacent shoreline, causing even more damage.

I am finding the “50 meter” line difficult to believe given some tsunamis don’t even get that high but maybe it is true. It certainly sounds like Huang Xuebin has been waiting to get that off his chest for a long time.

I’m nearly at the end of this post and I seem to have wasted the opportunity to give the Chinese government due credit. This is what everyone wanted - an open discussion on how to tackle the huge environmental concerns that have arisen from the construction of the dam - and it emphatically supports the leadership’s pledge to place environmental concerns over economic development ahead of the CPC congress. Of course many people will say it should have happened sooner and the treatment of environmental activist and journalist Dai Qing, whose book Yangtze! Yangtze! earned her 10 months in a maximum security prison and the threat of the death sentence (according to the Independent), should not be forgotten.

Three posts and two are about China’s Three Gorges - a subject which has already been subjected to publicity overkill. But, without wishing to sound like a god dam (no apologies for that particular pun) gorge geek, I couldn’t ignore this latest report from Xinhua about power generation plans.

Having reported that the water level of the reservoir was being lowered to bail out the thirsty lower reaches of the Yangtze River - the water level is at an all-time low -, the China Three Gorges Project Corporation has set a power generation target which relies on the significant raising of the water level in the reservoir.

 The Three Gorges power plant and the downstream Gezhouba power plant on China’s Yangtze River plan to generate 78.6 billion kilowatt-hours (kwh) of electricity in 2007, up 23 percent on the previous year.

The raised water level in the Three Gorges Reservoir and new generators that will come into operation this year will ensure fulfillment of the target, said Cao Guangjing, deputy general manager of China Three Gorges Project Corporation, which manages the two power plants.

I am annoyed I wasn’t in my Xinhua box of an office when this story was released. The article ignores the issues of drought and a reduction in the water level - due to a general lack of thought by this particular journalist rather than censorship.  It also allows Cao Guangjing to get away with being vague. He has set a target of 78.6 billion kwh of electricty in 2007 but has attributed that to the Three Gorges and another power plant. So now we may never know the specific Three Gorges target and if they are struggling to meet it. This could have been a deliberately vague target or just inept reporting from the Xinhua local bureau journalist. But the main question that arises is: Did they ever actually reduce the water level of the reservoir in response to water shortages?

The water level of the lower reaches of the Yangtze River is at its lowest since records began in 1877. The water level in Chongqing, further upstream, is only 0.35 metres higher than the record low in 1987 and one million people in Chongqing are suffering water shortages, according to a Xinhua report on Monday.

On January 11, Xinhua reported that the Three Gorges Corporation planned to open the dam’s floodgates to reduce the water level in the reservoir from 155 metres to a possible 144 metres - just three months after the level was raised from 135 metres, to much fanfare of course. On January 18, Xinhua reported that the measure had met with little success:

The Three Gorges dam has opened its floodgates to feed the river, but statistics from monitoring stations in central China’s Hubei province and east China’s Jiangsu province have shown no perceptible rise in water levels.

So what effects will all this have on the power generating targets of the Three Gorges Project? The dam generated 49.2 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity in 2006, according to Guess Who (well I do have unavoidable access to the Xinhua database seven hours a day so forgive my bias). This figure was down 16.1 billion kwh from the previous year and well below the target of 62 billion kwh set at the beginning of 2006. The drop was not explicity acknowledged in the Xinhua report but an unnamed official appeared to blame it on the lowest volume of water to flow through the dam area for 137 years.

Even more suprising then are the comments reported in Monday’s Xinhua story:

Sources with the China Three Gorges Project Corporation said the water shortage in the upper reaches had not affected the world’s largest water storage facility.

I’m not a hydrology expert but I do subscribe to the hydropower station formula of less water = less power. If the drought continues, the Three Gorges Corp has a serious problem. It generated less than 50 billion kwh last year and if they continue at that rate, it will generate 250 billion kwh over the next five years. This does not meet the 300 billion kwh of electricity it has already presold to the State Power Grids for the 2006-2010 period. Their long-term plan of producing 84.7 billion kwh of electricity (a stat tacked onto the end of every Xinhua story about the Three Gorges Dam) does look ambitious at this point.

But despite all this doom and gloom over fast-appearing sections of riverbed and reports that severe drought will last until May (and return for 30 days in the summer), Chinese Water Resources Vice Minister E Jingping is warning everyone about the possibility of flooding along the Yangtze. His assertion is of course based on the soundest of evidence: the Yangtze has “not seen serious floods in recent years” so this increases the chances of flooding according to “the law of nature”.

Beijing has suffered sandstorms in recent years so surely it can’t happen this March - according to the law of nature, averages, whatever you want to call it.