DAMMING THE ANGRY RIVER By Ralph Litzinger Environmental groups are creatively using the media to draw attention to what is happening to the forests, rivers, lakes, and diverse peoples of the Tibetan Plateau.?

ITHE NU OR ANGRY RIVER is one of the last un-dammed major rivers in China. From a trickle of snowmelt on the southern slopes of the Tanggula Mountain Range in Northern Tibet ( Qinghai Province), it flows through the imposing Gaoligong Snow Mountain range in Tibet and Yunnan, twists and turns through deep canyons and seemingly impassable gorges for some 2018 kilometres before it finally enters Myanmar and becomes the holy Salween.

Keeping the Nu undammed has sparked the latest in a series of activist confrontations with the Chinese authorities aimed at protecting China’s astonishingly rich biological resources.Such challenges to state action has been multiplying and intensifying since the mid-1990s. Environmental groups lobby for change with a variety of media weapons - newspapers and weekly journals, television and videography, public photography exhibits and teach-ins, and the distribution of petitions on the Internet. However, a common goal does not necessarily spell unity in action.

To Dam or not to Dam

As a Chinese journalist told me in May this year, “dam fever” is sweeping through the western provinces of China, despite the long-term controversy and debate that has surrounded the Three Gorges Dam. Development corporations from Guangzhou, Beijing, and Shanghai are constantly scouting the area, seeking out waterways big and small from Guizhou to Sichuan and Yunnan, Qinghai and Tibet, seducing provincial authorities with talk of cheap electricity and shared profits, and promising local residents that their lives will be better once modernisation arrives and backwardness is left behind.

In this regard, the anti-dam movement that began in late 2003 and continued on through the spring of 2004 is particularly poignant. On June 14, 2003 Yunnan television reported that a new hydropower development company had been created to explore hydropower development on the Nu River in the far northwest corner of Yunnan. This was followed by numerous reports in the print media. Evidently the brainchild of one of Li Peng’s sons, this new corporation was created when the China Huadian Corporation, the Yunnan Development Investment Company, the Yunnan Electricity Group’s Hydropower Construction Company, and the Yunnan Nu River Electricity Group signed an agreement to pool resources and funds (initially 200 million yuan, with more financing in the works) to dam the Nu River. At the signature ceremony held in Kunming in June of 2003, the new development corporation revealed an ambitious plan to build an 13-step dam system over the next 20 years, with the first one, the 180,000 kilowatt Liuku station, slated to begin in September of 2003.

The proposed dam project is situated in the heart of the Hengduan Mountain Range which is part of the eastern wing of the Himalayas, an area now know to the world as the Three Parallel Rivers (sanjiang bingliu) World Heritage site. Ironically, UNESCO approved the Chinese government’s bid for the Three Parallel Rivers site in Paris on July 3, 2003, just weeks after the Nu River Hydropower Development company was created. This World heritage site measures some 1.7 million hectares, the largest World Heritage Site in all of China.

Environmental activists, conservation botanists, and many government officials involved in forestry and nature reserve management will tell you that this area has some of the best-preserved variety of plant and animal life in all of China, if not the world. WWF, Conservation International, The Nature Conservancy and other international organisations recognise this area as one of the world’s most diverse biodiversity hotspots; it is, in effect, a living botanical laboratory. In conversations, they all speak of this land with such passion, commitment, and knowledge that “Green Love” best describes their affection for the region’s biodiversity.

Construction and Controversy

Nor was this the first time that controversy over the Yunnan’s government’s dam operations appeared in the press. In late 1995, the 1250-megawatt Manwan dam was completed on the Mekong, which is now connected to a grid serving Kunming’s growing power demand. Soon thereafter construction began on a dam in Jinghong in southern Yunnan, followed shortly thereafter by the Xiaowan dam, currently the largest in Yunnan, which is now supplying electricity to Yunnan, as well as to Guangdong. Yunnan government officials have made it abundantly clear that these dams are part of a provincial development strategy to make money by targeting the regional electricity market.

By the late 1990s, Yunnan was cooperating with the Japanese government and several US commercial interests to develop additional hydro projects on the Mekong, as Yunnan continued to position itself as the key supplier of electricity to other provinces in China, as well as countries throughout mainland Southeast Asia.

Pressure From the Neighbours

Organised activism against the Nu River dam project did not originate in China. In 1996, government officials in Cambodia began to complain to China that dam projects on the Mekong River in Yunnan were decreasing the flow of water into the Tonle Sap lake, the lifeblood of Cambodia. Later that year, the Vietnamese government complained that these dam projects threatened to reduce water flow to the southern Mekong Delta, on which Vietnam relies for 60% of its agricultural output.

By the start of the new millennium, NGOs and other water and fishery rights organisations in mainland Southeast Asia began to pressure the Chinese government. For example, several months after the creation of the Yunnan Huadian Nu River Hydropower Development Company (in June 2003), the Southeast Asia Rivers Network, with an office in Bangkok, publicly criticised the project and called on the Chinese government to consult with countries downstream before the building of the dam.

On December 16, 2003, the Thai director of the Rivers Network submitted a protest letter to the Chinese Ambassador in Thailand, demanding that the Chinese government suspend the project immediately. The protest letter was endorsed by 82 different environmental, community development and human rights organisations based in Thailand and Burma. The protest letter argued that the Nu River was shared by three different countries, that a wide range of peoples of different ethnicities depend on the river for their livelihood, both for fisheries and to fertilise cultivated land, and that the river flowed through some of the most spectacular scenery in all of West China, including the Three Parallel Rivers World Heritage Site.

 Conservation versus Development

Though these Southeast Asian groups did not know it at the time, they had friends in high places – behind the vermilion walls of the Zhongnanhai government compound in Beijing. In September of 2003, certain authorities in the central government complained to Premier Wen Jiabao that the Yunnan government should not have permitted the creation of a new hydroelectric corporation without the authorisation of Beijing. (In fact, in August 2003, the National Development and Innovation Committee had already reviewed and approved the hydropower plans for the Nu River). In late September, China’s National Environmental Protection Bureau held a closed door meeting in Beijing, at which they invited 30 experts in zoology, forestry, farming and geology to comment on the Nujiang dam proposal. The story now runs that every one of these experts opposed the dam. They argued that it had been poorly thought out, excessively driven by the profit motive, and would adversely affect the biodiversity of the region and further strain relations between the government and the region’s multiple ethnic minority populations.

I learnt in Beijing in May that some of these experts had worked as consultants to the committee that prepared the application for the Three Parallel Rivers World Heritage nomination. A major rift had thus occurred between conservation minded experts, many with strong ties to the Chinese Communist Party and the government, and those within the government pushing for the exploitation of Yunnan’s rivers as part of the Western development strategy, the xibu dakaifa.

The NGO Response

News of this meeting began to leak out in Beijing in late 2003. Certain environmental groups in Beijing, most notably Liang Congjie’s Friends of Nature and Wang Yongchen’s Green Volunteers were contacted by the Southeast Asia Rivers Network; they were asked to join the campaign, first started in Thailand, to halt the Nu River dam project.

These and other activists in Beijing decided to resurrect an earlier successful media strategy. In the mid-1990s the wildlife photographer and environmental activist Xi Zhinong was working as a photographer for the Yunnan Forestry Bureau when he discovered that the Deqin County government was engaged in illegal logging in the Baimang Nature Reserve in northwest Yunnan, in an area that threatened to destroy some of the last remaining habitat of the endangered Yunnan snub-nosed monkey. Shunned by the Yunnan Provincial government, Xi and his wife, Shi Lihong, then a China Daily journalist with family connections at CCTV, managed to air a documentary on national television exposing the monkey’s plight.

Soon after, a number of “green camps” were formed on college campuses in Beijing. Following several months of planning, they embarked on a long overland trek to the Baimang Nature Reserve, meeting with government officials, nature reserve personnel, and village residents. This “investigative tour” was recorded by renowned journalist Shen Xiaohui, and published in his book, Xueshan Xunmeng. The strategy worked: within months the central government had ordered an end to the illegal logging, and the county official who brokered the deal was replaced.

Gathering Strength

In February of 2004, 20 journalists, environmental protection volunteers, and conservation scholars in Beijing joined up with activists in Yunnan and embarked on a similar investigative tour. For nine days from February 19-24, they travelled along the Nu River, held meetings with local officials, collected stories from village residents about their fears and anxieties concerning the dam construction (which mostly concerned issues of relocation), took photographs and recorded video.

Returning to Beijing in early March, they began preparations for a major educational exhibition of their findings, which they had hoped to hold on March 14, International Day of Action Against Dams. Under pressure from the government, they cancelled this action, and decided to create a web site, which you can now visit at www.nujiang.ngo.cn. A friend involved in these activities told me that by late March everyone’s spirits were down. It seemed that even given the dissent within the government, little could be done to stop the dam construction on the Nu River, which was scheduled to begin in September 2004.

Wen Jiabao’s Intervention

In early April, the situation took an unexpected turn. The Nujiang web site up was up and running, in both English and Chinese, and plans were underway for a photographic exhibition at the Xidan bookstore in central Beijing. And then the big news cam on April 7, 2004: Hong Kong’s Mingbao Daily reported that on April 1 st Premier Wen Jiabao had ordered a “suspension” of the dam project. Premier Wen went on the record to state that he was concerned that the dam project had become too controversial, but he made no mention of activist groups in Southeast Asia or the protest letter submitted to the PRC Embassy in Bangkok. He called for a more extensive investigative study of the dam project, and for more involvement by the scientific and environmental communities.

Within days, environmental groups in Yunnan, Beijing, throughout China and the rest of the world claimed this as a great victory. People involved in the campaign were shocked but also exuberant: one friend said it was like waking up from a dream to find the dream was real. Word of the premier’s decision spread across Chinese and English language web sites and chat rooms. Even the New York Times took note, running a front page article on April 9 th called: “Premier Orders Halt to a Dam Project Threatening a Lost Eden.”

From Green Love to Envy

Following this initial celebratory mood, however, competition and jealousies emerged about just who should get credit and, more importantly, public recognition for organising the opposition to the dam. Among activists in Beijing and Kunming, there is strikingly little recognition of the role that the Southeast Asia Rivers Network, based in Bangkok, played in the early phases of the movement.

Divisions have also emerged between the journalistic, scholarly, and NGO communities. Some journalists have claimed in post-movement meetings in Beijing that they were the crucial force, arguing that without the media attention they brought to the February investigative tour, nothing would have happened. Scholars and NGO activists claim that the campaign was successful because they worked behind the scenes to get key government officials to put pressure on Wen Jiabao, and then worked publicly through the creative use of the press and through public teach-ins that taught the “people” about the potential devastations the dam project would bring to the peoples and biology of the Nu River region. Wen Jiabao, they claim, feared not just the controversy within and between different government organisations and the new hydro project corporation, but more importantly, he feared the public support the movement had garnered; he feared the will of the masses.

Despite these battles behind the scenes, it is clear that the movement to oppose the damming of the Angry River has enabled activists, scholars, and environmental scientists to bring issues of large-scale hydroelectric development - at least in the far corner of northwest Yunnan - into the realm of public debate. Civil society has become one of the most hotly contested terms in the new millennium, dismissed by some as a useless analytic construct or a vacuous ideological trope, and eulogised by others as providing a diverse array of people with a new language to talk about democracy, community needs, social justice, and populist politics. In all likelihood, the Angry River will one day be dammed. But the cacophony of voices that have emerged to oppose the dam project will not easily be silenced.

Ralph Litzinger is an associate professor of cultural anthropology at Duke University and the Director of the Asia/ Pacific Studies Institute. He spent a year in northwest Yunnan in 2001-2002 as a Fulbright research scholar, and is completing a book project on environmental activism in China.

Is Leaping Tiger Next? In October 2004, The Independent revealed the next environmental battleground in southwest China. The same developer behind the Nujiang project is already blasting rock to build a massive dam on the Jinsha River in northwest Yunnan. The secretive project could displace up to 100,000 people and threaten Tiger Leaping Gorge, one of the world’s deepest, and among the last unspoiled places in China . Nine NGOs have petitioned Premier Wen: ‘We call on the authorities to fulfil the vision of science-based development ... to balance the human interests against nature, in order to leave our precious world heritage like Tiger Leaping Gorge, the first bend of the Yangtze, to the world and to future generations’.