Lost on Planet China - J. Maarten Troost [135]
Sadly, we could barely see it, this very large dam that should not be hard to see. It’s more than a mile long and 610 feet high, but so thick was the fog that little could be seen beyond the locks that carried ships above it. There was a sound system near the viewing platform and it informed us that “when the dam is completed it will have the attention of the world.” This seemed very important to China, to be noticed, to be paid attention to.
And they could already see that the world was watching. The Three Gorges Dam generates 22,500 megawatts of power, which sounds like a lot but comprises a mere 3 percent of China’s energy generation. The Three Gorges Dam seemed like a lot of trouble and destruction for a 3-percent bump in the power supply. It does little to alleviate the burden from China’s 21,000 coal mines. And nuclear energy still produced only a little more than 2 percent of electricity in China.
And only now is the dam’s environmental impact becoming evident. According to Xinhua, the state-run news agency, the lack of water flow in the Yangtze is preventing the river from flushing out the pollution, and needless to say, there is a lot of pollution floating in the Yangtze River. Increasing levels of sedimentation have become problematic, and today the Yangtze is an extraordinarily brown river. And now there are algae blooms too. The eroding banks along the reservoir have caused landslides and waves that, incredibly, have reached 150 feet high. And these are the problems that the government admits to. Who knows what’s really going on.
“So will you join my tour to Wuhan?” Lu Hang asked me as we walked around the visitors’ center. “I will get you a hat.”
“I am very tempted because of the hat.”
But there are 10 million people in Wuhan, and those were 10 million very good reasons not to go there (no offense, good people of Wuhan). Instead I made my way to Yichang, a modest city on the banks of the Yangtze, where I walked around trying to figure out why there were so many coffee shops. And as I walked around some more, I came to the inescapable conclusion that there were so many coffee shops because Yichang itself is such a sedative. True, there were people waltzing in a riverside square. And there was a strange plethora of bridal boutiques. But this small city lacked the mad vibe I’d come to expect in a Chinese city. It was strangely quiet. I walked into the Old Street Café Bar, which was doing a very good imitation of a Hungarian café, with its high ceiling and gold inlay and wall paintings done in the style of Titian, ordered a coffee, and wrote postcards featuring giant earthmoving equipment and cranes for my sons. There are quite likely only two groups of people who think that building the world’s largest dam might be a really cool thing to do—Communists and the Bob the Builder set.
22
Xi’an reminded me of Dusseldorf. This was the peculiar thought I had as I wandered around the Bell Tower, a gray stone eminence from the Qing Dynasty that marked the center of the city. How can this be? you wonder. Isn’t Xi’an the fabled terminus of the Silk Road? Yes, it is. Isn’t Dusseldorf in Germany? Yes. And isn’t Xi’an in China? Yep. And aren’t Germany and China, you know, different? Truer words have never been spoken. So how can Xi’an be like Dusseldorf?
I know. It’s weird. Here I was in an ancient capital that had presided over the rise and collapse of eleven dynasties, and I was thinking of Dusseldorf. Perhaps it was the rain. Whenever I’m in Dusseldorf, the weather is dreary. And it was dreary in Xi’an too.