Comprehensive Examination in English: Session I
Part B

for Interdisciplinary Teaching
Michelle Stappler, Regents High School Examination

*Midway between its icy source in Tibet and the fertile delta at its mouth in Shanghai, 3,900 miles to the east, China's Yangtze River hurtles through a series of sheer chasms known as the Three Gorges.

Later this month, Chinese Premier Li Peng will preside over the symbolic first pouring of concrete in what is intended to be the world's largest hydroelectric dam. Already, mammoth earthworks on both banks of the construction site have begun to constrict the flow of the river where it gushes forth from the Xiling Gorge.

Over the next 14 years, if all goes as planned, first an earthen coffer dam and then a 200-yd.-high concrete spillway and adjacent set of ship-lifting locks will block the swirling channel, transforming the Three Gorges into a single deep and currentless [sic] reservoir. Covering everything from ancient temples to current slag heaps, the water will flood 28,000 acres of farmland and 20 towns and drive 1.4 million people from their homes.

The gigantic Three Gorges project has inspired awe and opposition ever since. ... To opponents, it's a symbol of mankind's monstrous interventions in nature, an enterprise that will not only displace people but also devastate wildlife and alter the landscape forever .... Says Dai Qing, a Chinese opponent of the dam who won a Goldman Environmental Prize last year, ... "I hope that people all over the world who love the environment and who love China will band together to stop this disastrous project."

Chinese leaders argue just as vehemently that Three Gorges is vital to their country's future -and actually good for the environment as a whole. They say it will prevent the periodic flooding that has claimed 500,000 lives in this century. More important, its production of clean hydroelectric power will reduce China's reliance on coal, the dirtiest of all fossil fuels, which now supplies 75% of the country's energy needs. The burning of coal has cast a pall of pollution over major Chinese cities and helped make pulmonary disease the nation's leading cause of death.

The issue is how a rapidly growing nation of 1.2 billion people, all of whom would like refrigerators and other conveniences, can promote economic development without reckoning its environment. For the Chinese government, hydropower in general and Three Gorges in particular are a big part of the solution. "The advantages outweigh the disadvantages," contends He Gong, vice president of the China Yangtze Three Gorges Project Development Corp.

How China meets its energy needs has an impact far beyond its boundaries. Sulfurous emissions from Chinese power plants and factories blow eastward and fall as acid rain on Japan and Korea. In fact, the pollution has planet-wide- implications: China is the world's second-largest producer of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that are collecting in the atmosphere and may, many scientists believe, lead to global warming. If China maintains its annual economic growth rate of 11%, the country will need to add 17,000 megawatts of electrical generating capacity each year for the rest of the decade. Within ten years, that would be as much new power as the U.S. generates overall today. If China uses mostly coal to produce that power, the greenhouse effect could be catastrophic.

Many opponents of Three Gorges have no quarrel with the effort to move away from coal toward hydropower. But they argue that for a lower price, numerous smaller dams could produce more power and greater flood-control benefits. They fear that a dam so large on the notoriously muddy Yangtze will lead to dangerous buildups of silt in some parts of the river, creating new obstacles to navigation and causing floods upstream. Chinese officials respond that both big and small dams are needed. Indeed, 10 projects smaller than Three Gorges, with a total capacity of nearly 12,000 megawatts, are under construction on the upper reaches of the Yangtze and its tributaries..