3rd Week Dammed if they do

[qua 11]

Banyan

Dammed if they do

China's hydropower plans are a test of its avowed good neighbourliness

Jul 8th 2010

IN YUNNAN in south-west China the biggest floods in a dozen years have ended a long, brutal drought. For months here in Xishuangbanna, a glassy Mekong had merely sauntered towards the border with Laos. River trade came to a halt as vessels ran aground. But for two or three weeks now the Mekong has been back to its usual roiling brown, and the cargo boats throw up a huge bow wave as they inch upstream.

Full rivers are good news for everyone, but especially for China’s dam-builders. They have huge ambitions for hydropower from the three great rivers—the Salween, the Mekong and the Yangzi—that come roaring out of the Tibetan plateau and tumble down through northern Yunnan in steep parallel gorges, each a mountain ridge apart. The rivers then wend their separate ways before reaching the sea in very different places: the Salween in Myanmar, the Mekong in southern Vietnam and the Yangzi near Shanghai. In Yunnan these rivers and their valleys form one of the world’s most remarkable hotspots of biodiversity.

To the engineers who dominate China’s leadership, the rivers’ wildness must seem an impertinence. On the Mekong alone China has planned or built eight dams. In Xishuangbanna the new Jinghong dam has just started operating. Further up, Xiaowan dam will be finished by 2013. It will be the highest arch dam in the world, and China’s biggest hydropower project after the Three Gorges on the middle Yangzi. The reservoir behind it is already filling up.

On the Salween are proposals for 13 dams. Unusually vociferous protests about their social and environmental costs led the prime minister, Wen Jiabao, to call a halt. Yet many locals have already been resettled, and it is surely a matter of time before at least some of the proposals are dusted off.

In general, scrutiny of China’s water projects is scant, and the government is in a hurry. It wants to add electricity-generating capacity, lest China’s breakneck growth be impeded. Giant hydropower companies, with impeccable political connections, add their own layer of secrecy. Risks attend those who question the lack of transparency. Perhaps 500,000 locals, mainly ethnic minorities, are being displaced and forcibly resettled. Those who protest are threatened with less compensation, if not jail.

The Chinese press steers clear of dams with a barge-pole. Academics and NGO representatives who oppose the dam-building on social or environmental grounds do not want their names published. In private even academics in favour of hydropower development complain that nearly all relevant information, even the amount of rain that reaches them, is treated as a state secret. (Though, they add, at China’s meteorological and rivers bureaus, even state secrets can be imparted if the price is right.)

Until recently China was no less communicative towards downstream neighbours, who have seen a sharp drop in Mekong levels in recent years. Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam complain that China neither consults nor informs them about what it is up to. For all that it preaches harmony and good neighbourliness, China comes across as a regional bully, with its foot on the Mekong’s throat. The Mekong basin is the greatest inland fishing region in the world. Distraught Thai, Laotian and Cambodian fisherman and farmers blame Chinese dams for killing off fish stocks, cutting irrigation and disrupting livelihoods. Recently a Bangkok Posteditorial accused China of “Killing the Mekong”.

In March China broke its silence over dams, denying that it was responsible for reducing the Mekong’s flow reaching downstream neighbours. It blamed instead the drought, from which China has suffered as much as anyone. The truth lies somewhere in between. Less than one-sixth of the total Mekong catchment is in China, but that upstream flow is crucial to neighbours during the dry season. China has held some of the dry-season flow back.

The monsoon rains of the past month will help draw some of the criticism’s sting. So too, perhaps, will a possible easing of Chinese secrecy. In April China defended itself (another first) at the Mekong River Commission, the inter-governmental body supposed to resolve disputes. And last month China took officials from Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam to view both Xiaowan and Jinghong dams. Banyan had less luck. Near Jinghong nervous policemen ordered him to leg it before he got so much as a glimpse of the structure.

Still, the shift in public diplomacy may mark a slightly broader approach towards what China perceives to be in its national interest. At the very least, the countries resentful of China’s dams are also those to which it hopes to sell the electricity. But a cynic might further conclude that to the extent that upriver dams smooth a flow’s seasonal extremes, China’s upriver projects actually make ones in downstream countries more feasible, too. There are nearly a dozen plans to dam the lower Mekong, and Chinese state construction companies want to be involved.

Those in glassy waters shouldn’t throw stones

Such plans suggest that though China is getting all the brickbats, downstream countries should face much closer scrutiny too. China, says a water expert at the Asian Development Bank, is not to blame for all their woes. For instance, the alarming salinisation of the Mekong delta, Vietnam’s rice-basket, appears to be happening not because of China, as some Vietnamese claim, but at least in part because of Vietnam’s own hydropower projects nearby. Laos is expected soon officially to announce its intention to build at least one Mekong dam, with potentially devastating consequences for the migratory fish species that, among other things, provide essential protein for many Cambodians. Pity the poor wild rivers and their amazing diversity: dammed if the riparian neighbours fail to co-operate, and damneder if they do.

Economist.com/blogs/banyan