China’s latest ‘exports’ are large dam projects. But what it calls ‘development’ comes at a great cost

HONG KONG: In the gushing prose favoured by Chinese government pamphlets, the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze river in China is billed as a “modern-day wonder of the world”. The world’s largest hydroelectric power project, being built at a cost of over $30 billion, is in many ways a concrete metaphor for New China and its prevailing ‘Big is Beautiful’ mindset.

But in less flattering assessments that factor in the social and environmental costs of big-money development projects, the Three Gorges Dam is the “world’s most notorious” and a “model for disaster”. Even Chinese government officials and experts have conceded in recent years that the project would lead to an “environmental catastrophe”.  But now, international environmental and human rights advocacy groups are concerned that China, which is home to half of the world’s 45,000 largest dams, is ‘exporting’ the same ruinous Three Gorges Dam model to countries across the world, at incalculable environmental and social costs. “Chinese financiers and dam-builders, most of them large state-owned enterprises, may be involved in up to 158 large dam projects in 39 countries around the world,” says Nicole Brewer, China Global Program Associate at International Rivers, which campaigns against “destructive dams and the development model they advance.”

Most of these projects, Brewer told DNA, are in developing countries in South-East Asia and Africa, where hydropower resources have yet to be developed. “And typically China is willing to do business — and is more in demand — in countries where traditional funders like the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank have withdrawn owing to escalating social, environmental and financial risks.” 

In addition to this being a business strategy, there is a “strong geo-political component” to China’s becoming the world’s dam builder, says Brewer. In South-East Asia and South Asia, it has to do with creating long-term ties with countries with which China has a strategic interest, such as Malaysia, Indonesia, Pakistan, Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia. And in Africa, China’s engagement is linked to its drive to secure mineral and oil resources for its own supercharged economic growth.  China’s policy of economic engagement with governments without setting governance conditions — as Western funding agencies and governments do — is also a consideration. “China has adopted the principle of non-interference of other nations’ internal affairs in its foreign relations,” says a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson. China, he adds, will not “impose its values, social systems and ideology” upon any country.

It’s a strategy that’s paying off handsomely for China. Heads of governments in host countries are effusive in their praise of Chinese aid and concessional loans, even if they are tied to identifying Chinese contractors to build large dam projects. Senegal’s President Abdoulaye Wade said earlier this year that China’s approach to his country’s needs “is better adapted than the slow and sometimes patronising post-colonial approach of European investors.” And Sierra Leone’s ambassador to China observed in 2005 that China was doing more than the Group of 8 developed nations to “make poverty history… The Chinese don’t hold meetings about environmental impact assessment, human rights, bad governance and good governance… Chinese investment is succeeding because they don’t set high benchmarks.” International advocacy groups say it’s important to distinguish between host country governments’ enthusiasm and the views of millions of people displaced by the project, and to factor in the environmental and social costs of such projects.

“There is strong evidence that Chinese dam builders don’t abide by international norms — or even domestic laws — relating to environmental and social impact assessment,” says Brewer.

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3.23 Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."