Hugh Bollinger / Friday, May 20, 2011

Up the Yangtze...without a paddle

In January 2008, the Sundance Institute presented Up the Yantgze in their festival's documentary competition. The films director-- Yung Chang, a Canadian of Chinese origins --used a powerful storytelling metaphor showcasing a single peasant family to tell a vast narrative about the social and environmental impact of the Three Gorges Dam being constructed across the Yangtze River in China. Utilizing compact digital cameras and with fluency in Chinese, Chang was able to film undetected. He presented a documentary that amazed the Sundance audiences. I had the honor of meeting Chang at the Filmmakers Lounge-- an off-screen venue Sundance makes available to producers, directors, and actors with films in the Festival --and we talked about the movie before it screened. [caption id="attachment_4197" align="aligncenter" width="480" caption="Three Gorges Dam photo credit: China Tourism"]

[/caption] The Three Gorges Dam was the product of development schemes taught to the Chinese by planners in the Soviet Union who envisioned gigantic communist "command and control" engineering projects to tame the natural world. Even in China, the dam created considerable debate about its environmental and social impacts as Time Magazine noted in 2007. Besides damming the river and preventing its flow, millions of people would need to be moved to higher ground, and unknown ancient archeological sites would be lost forever. Additionally, the dams electric power generation could be compromised by silt clogging the electric turbines. Younger Chinese engineers proposed smaller, more efficient, dams along tributaries of the Yangtze but their voices were ignored or silenced and the Three Gorges Dam went ahead. It now seems they were correct in voicing their concerns. The Wall Street Journal reports that even the official Chinese media has had to admit major flaws in the dam and concerns are growing. In the guarded language of the Chinese communist party, the Three Gorges Dam is now claimed to have "suffered from a number of problems that are urgently in need of resolution." They didn't elucidate. This is like saying that you're "up a creek without a paddle" and the Yangtze is a very large and unpredictable creek. The film is worth renting! WHB

The century of disasters Connecting the world

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Tags: China's environment documentary film Sundance Film Festival Three Gorges Dam Up the Yangtze Yangtze River

Up the Yangtze...without a paddle

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