{"id":9758,"date":"2011-06-11T10:47:59","date_gmt":"2011-06-11T14:47:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=9758"},"modified":"2011-06-11T10:47:59","modified_gmt":"2011-06-11T14:47:59","slug":"china-finally-admits-to-some-problems-at-the-three-gorges-megadam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2011\/06\/11\/china-finally-admits-to-some-problems-at-the-three-gorges-megadam\/","title":{"rendered":"China finally admits to (some) problems at the Three Gorges megadam"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s been “officially” a wonderful thing with absolutely no negative attributes for so long that it’s almost refreshing that the Chinese government is finally admitting it’s not all good news<\/a> around the massive Three Gorges dam and reservoir:<\/p>\n

\n

In private, officials have worried about the project for some time and occasionally their doubts have surfaced in the official media. But the government itself has refused to acknowledge them. When the project was approved by the rubber-stamp parliament in 1992, debate was stifled by the oppressive political atmosphere of the time, following the Tiananmen Square massacre three years earlier. Last July, with the dam facing its biggest flood crest since completion in 2006, officials hinted that they might have overstated its ability to control flooding. On May 18th, with the dam again in the spotlight because of the drought, a cabinet meeting chaired by the prime minister, Wen Jiabao, went further in acknowledging drawbacks.<\/p>\n

Having called the dam \u201chugely beneficial overall\u201d, the cabinet\u2019s statement said there were problems relating to the resettlement of 1.4m people, to the environment and to the \u201cprevention of geological disasters\u201d that urgently needed addressing. The dam, it said, had had \u201ca certain impact\u201d on navigation, irrigation and water-supply downstream. Some of these problems had been forecast at the design stage or spotted during construction. But they had been \u201cdifficult to resolve effectively because of limitations imposed by conditions at the time.\u201d It did not elaborate. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s been “officially” a wonderful thing with absolutely no negative attributes for so long that it’s almost refreshing that the Chinese government is finally admitting it’s not all good news around the massive Three Gorges dam and reservoir: In private, officials have worried about the project for some time and occasionally their doubts have surfaced […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,65,84],"tags":[497,590,269],"class_list":["post-9758","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-china","category-environment","category-government","tag-electricity","tag-engineering","tag-propaganda"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-2xo","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9758","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9758"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9758\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9760,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9758\/revisions\/9760"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9758"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9758"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9758"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}