A New “China Syndrome”?

By Lori Pottinger, Africa Program Director, International Rivers

October 17, 2007 — China’s interest in forging ties with African governments and its
willingness to fund African dams, mines, factories and roads
“without strings” are tempting nations fed up with Western
colonialism and paternalism. But just as the Western development
model proved a less-than-perfect match for Africa, China’s
development assistance has serious drawbacks.

China has a wealth of experience in dam building, which has, of
late, proved tantalizing for African governments desperate to find
reliable sources of energy. China is home to thousands of dams,
including what is probably the world’s most notorious, the Three
Gorges Dam. While proponents of the dam hailed it as an engine for
development and growth, critics point to another side of the
story, a saga of destroyed ecosystems and social impacts that is
now coming fully to light.

Three Gorges’s gigantism is the root of some of its worst
problems. The massive project set records for number of people
displaced (at least one million), number of settlements drowned
(13 cities, 140 towns, 1,350 villages), and length of reservoir
(more than 400 miles). Now, its record-breaking environmental
impacts are coming to fruition. . The US business newspaper The
Wall Street Journal reports, “a year after completion, the project
has new problems — including landslides, water pollution and
suggestions that the dam could contribute to the very flooding it
was built to prevent.” A top official said, “the problems are all
more serious than we expected.”

In an article on August 29, the Journal reported that the massive
weight of water behind the dam is eroding the Yangtze River’s
shores, causing landslides. The reservoir is polluted from raw
sewage runoff and the submergence of so much industrialized land.
By stopping silt from moving downstream, the dam has dramatically
altered the river’s estuary and fisheries it supports. Seawater is
now coming further inland. Because the silt-free waters downstream
of the dam flow faster now, flood control structures have been
damaged.

Three Gorges is not alone in its litany of seemingly intractable
problems — problems that have the potential to outweigh the
benefits. According to the official Xinhua news agency, more than
one-third of China’s 85,000 or so reservoirs have “serious”
structural problems. A deputy minister of water resources recently
called China’s reservoirs “time bombs” that threaten the lives and
property of those downstream, the Journal reports. In addition,
China’s dams and diversions have so depleted many major rivers of
water that they have either become slow-moving cesspools or dry up
for part of their course, adding to a nationwide water crisis that
will only worsen with global warming.

Chinese officials aren’t talking about the troubling record of
large dams with their own citizens, much less with African
governments to whom they are selling their dam-building services.
China is today building dams in dozens of countries around the
world, including a number of African nations, many of which have
poor or nonexistent environmental and social protections for such
projects, and in some cases, such as Burma and Sudan, no political
space to speak out nor media to keep an eye on problem projects.
Rivers such as the Zambezi, Nile and Congo could be seriously
harmed by dam projects backed by China. Chinese firms and lending
agencies are involved in projects associated with serious human
rights violations, like Sudan’s Merowe Dam. The cumulative social
and environmental impacts of China’s worldwide dam-building could
outweigh the benefits these projects are intended to bring.

While China’s internal standards for environmental assessment,
access to information and resettlement have been improving in
recent years, the nation’s dam-builders may not feel compelled to
adhere to these standards on dam projects elsewhere. China is not
alone – northern dam-building nations have set aside their own
high standards for mitigation, public disclosure and environmental
analysis when it comes to building dams in the global south.

As China continues to reach out to African nations with
development assistance, its global record on large dams could grow
into a public relations disaster that threatens its reputation and
the good will it has built in many places. To help repair the
damage, China (and all other dam-building nations exporting their
expertise) must step back from the worst projects, and ensure that
those dams which are built are not doing more harm than good.
China has an obligation to protect human rights and the
environment under many international conventions, which it has
signed and ratified.

China can offer expertise and services that are better suited to
the needs of poor societies than large dams. China’s central
planning expertise is well-suited to assisting national agencies
with comprehensive needs and options assessments, improving
cumulative-impacts analysis for rivers with multiple dams, and
finding ways to improving the efficiency of existing dams before
building new ones. Its success in building poverty-busting
microhydro projects, biogas digesters, clean stoves and rainwater
harvesting structures could be a better fit for the problems found
in many of the places where large dams are being prioritized.
Starting with these steps, China could become a more effective
partner for Africa in solving some of its most intractable problems.

* Lori Pottinger is Africa Program Director of International Rivers
which is based in Berkeley, California