YICHANG, China -- Thousands of construction workers are moving mountains near here in a race to block the Yangtze River for the world's most powerful, costly and controversial hydroelectric project.
For the Chinese government, this grandiose venture -- the Three Gorges Dam -- is a high-stakes show of centralized power at a time when Beijing is losing a firm grip on much of the country.
But the dam's many Chinese and foreign critics, who still hope to stop its construction, predict that the project will result in a human, environmental and financial debacle.
"It's going to be the world's biggest man-made disaster," warns Dai Qing, a Beijing journalist who was jailed for 10 months for leading China's first environmental protest movement against the dam.
The first glimpses of that disaster are just now appearing along the world's third-longest river, where the dam will create a 375-mile-long lake flooding whole cities, hundreds of factories and the homes of at least 1.13 million Chinese.
Authorities will ultimately have to resettle about one of every 1,000 Chinese, the largest dam-induced migration in history and a seemingly impossible task in a densely populated nation short of arable land. They've adopted the hopeful notion of "development through resettlement," meaning that relocated families, farmers and firms are to end up better off.
But just among the first several thousand peasants to lose their ancestral homes to the coming deluge, many are worse off. They've already been stuck for almost a year in supposedly temporary hovels with no jobs, no way to grow food and not enough money or land to build permanent homes.
"There's not enough land here, and all we're getting from officials is empty talk," complains Liu Xingjia, 37, one of about 800 former farmers abruptly moved last fall from Qingjiatou village along the dam site to crude brick huts with leaking roofs about 25 miles downstream.
About half of Qingjiatou's villagers, those with savings, have built new houses. But many got less than $2,300 for their homes from the state; new homes start at $3,500.
As building costs soar, their nest eggs are going toward buying food they once grew. "Back home we didn't have to worry about food, but here we now even have to buy rice. We're eating our house money," Mr. Liu says.
"We were rushed here, and now they're busy building the dam and no one has time for us," he says. "Whether we support the dam or not is irrelevant. We have no choice. There's nothing for us to go back to. Our village is gone."
On that note, several village women standing nearby on the muddy hillside that's their new home break into tears. "We have so little money," one cries out angrily. "No one is taking care of us"
'Mandate of heaven'
But the impetus for building the Three Gorges Dam goes far beyond the Yangtze Valley -- far beyond even the project's big promises of clean power, flood control and better navigation.
More than anything else, the dam represents a modern-day quest by the Chinese Communist Party to display the imperial "mandate of heaven," tangible evidence of the right to rule.
"This is a script that's been written and rehearsed for decades, and the government is determined to perform it, no matter how bad the outcome," says Li Rui, a former secretary to Mao Tse-tung and vice minister of power, who has fought the project since the 1950s.
As China leaps to a primitive form of state capitalism, the dam also may be the last major gasp of Soviet-style central planning here. So everything about it is gargantuan.
A mile across and 600 feet high, the dam won't be finished until at least 2010. Its locks will be the world's largest. Its generators will produce 18,000 megawatts of electricity -- another record, equal to the output of ten nuclear plants and power badly needed by booming coastal China.
The dam also is intended to control an age-old pattern of lethal floods along the middle section of the Yangtze. And it's to open the treacherous upper river to bigger barges, aiding development of China's impoverished interior.
But even if the Three Gorges Dam defies its critics by fully realizing these promises, its high costs seem likely to outstrip its benefits.
That, essentially, led the U.S. Reclamation Bureau to withdraw all aid for the dam last year, after offering 10 years ago to help build it.
Says Dan Beard, bureau commissioner: "It is a highly visible example of an approach to solving water problems that we no longer believe in. Large dams like this cost a lot and don't deliver their promises."
Long-term costs
Independent estimates of the project's total bill run as high as $75 billion over two decades, about seven times its official price tag in 1993 and more than China's current annual national budget.
With little foreign aid -- the World Bank is very wary, and attracting private capital may prove difficult -- the dam will be built with deficit spending that could drive up inflation here for years.
More significantly, the project will alter forever the ecology of the entire Yangtze Valley -- setting in motion many unresolved questions for the valley's 400 million residents, about 7 percent of the world's population.
It's not just that the dam will inundate much of the Yangtze's fabled Three Gorges, 125 miles of narrows where the twisting river, soaring peaks and shifting mists moved Tang Dynasty poets to ecstasy.
There are also legitimate worries about earthquakes, landslides, endangered species, pollution, flooded archaeological sites, the dam's vulnerability in wartime and outright structural failure.
The most common fear is that it will create the world's largest and nastiest pond of mud -- a reservoir so filled with the Yangtze's silt that the entire project will become a white elephant.
And there are grave concerns about potential social and political instabilities stemming from the forced resettlement of so many people.
In advance of the rising waters, farmers are being ordered to trade long-cultivated orange groves along the Yangtze's banks for much less productive plots above the river valley. Some peasants are being sent to factories, which receive state funds to accept them, then sometimes immediately lay them off.
"What they plan to do is absolutely impossible -- there's no place to put all the people but high mountains and cliffs," says Mr. Li, the former Mao aide and top power official, who years ago supervised the migration of 300,000 peasants for another Chinese dam.
Adds Ms. Dai, the environmental activist: "It's going to backfire in dangerous ways."
Decades of debate
Because of these huge costs and potential problems, the Three Gorges project has been debated here for more than 70 years -- ever since it was first suggested by Sun Yat-sen, the leader of the revolution that toppled China's last imperial dynasty.
It's been a debate in which science has been tainted by politics. As such, the dam's status has been a reliable political indicator here: When the project has been on, dissent hasn't been tolerated.
In his 1956 poem "Swimming," Mao dreamed of the dam:
Walls of stone will stand upstream. . . .
Till a smooth lake rises in the narrow gorges.
The mountain goddess . . .
Will marvel at a world so changed.
But even Mao never firmly backed the project, and it was postponed a half-dozen times over three decades into the 1980s.
In the relatively open days of early 1989, the government responded to criticism of the dam by announcing that a decision on the project would be delayed for five years. But then came the Tiananmen Square massacre. Ms. Dai was jailed and, at one point, threatened with execution. Her 1989 book -- "Yangtze!, Yangtze!" -- was banned.
Within a year, Chinese Premier Li Peng, a Soviet-trained hydrologist who has long led the project, revived it. By early 1992, he orchestrated its approval by China's rubber-stamp parliament, despite that body's largest-ever opposition vote.
Two years later, the dam site -- a wide bend in the Yangtze near a former small town called Sandouping -- is abuzz seven days a week as workers charge ahead to realize officials' vow to block the Yangtze by 1997, the year China takes over Hong Kong.
The rough terrain here is yielding to squads of earth-movers. High-rises and long rows of shacks are sprouting to house a work force that will swell to 100,000. A new bridge rises across the Yangtze. There's the scent of money in the air -- and full-blown confidence.
"We can certainly build this dam," says a 28-year-old truck driver, who's come from Ningxia Province in northwest China to work on the dam for eight years. "China is very strong now."
But the dam's opponents hope for one last chance to kill it -- after the anticipated death of China's aged patriarch, Deng Xiaoping, who is widely credited with giving the project its final go-ahead.
"New leaders won't want to take such terrible risks by inheriting this mess," hopes Liang Congjie, a national political advisory body member and founder of China's first official environmental group, Friends of Nature.
Calculates Margaret Barber of Toronto's Probe International, an environmental group that's led the foreign attack on the dam: "As long as the river's not severed, this project can be stopped -- so it all depends if Deng dies soon enough."
Most critics of the big dam believe its power and flood-control benefits could be obtained more quickly and more cheaply by building much smaller dams on the tributaries to the Upper Yangtze and by shoring up dikes and other flood defenses on its middle reaches.
Tons of silt
Significantly, that alternative also might avoid problems from the 530 million tons of silt annually swept down the Yangtze from Sichuan Province's denuded slopes.
The silt is highly evident this time of year, high-water season, when China's "Golden Waterway" runs chocolate brown. But there's a wide variance of expert opinion about how fast silt will fill the reservoir and what can be done about it.
China's top expert, Lin Bingnan, says that, by lowering the reservoir's water level during the summer and flushing silt-laden water through the dam, Three Gorges will function well after 70 years.
"Do you think we'd be so dumb to stick our necks out for something that won't work?" he says.
But other Chinese and foreign experts say this same method has failed at another Chinese dam on the Yellow River, that siltation in the Three Gorges reservoir can't be precisely predicted, and that silt could render the new dam useless within 50 years.
"This is a perfect example of how this project's risks have been understated by its supporters," says Philip Williams, a San Francisco hydrologist and honorary president of the International Rivers Network, a group trying to protect natural waterways.
Dr. Williams even doubts that Three Gorges will deliver its promised flood control downstream, saying it will only give tens of millions of Chinese a dangerous "false sense of security." And upriver, he says, the dam could create a disaster for Chongqing, the largest upstream city and a major industrial center.
Chongqing officials fought for the dam to be so tall that its reservoir would be deep enough to allow big barges to serve the city. But a silt-caused rise in the river bed could stop boats from reaching the city and produce large floods there within a decade.
At the juncture of two fast-moving rivers, Chongqing also could end up sitting by a slow-moving lake rapidly being poisoned by the city's discharges of billions of tons of untreated wastes.
Says Zhao Shiqiang, president of a water-engineering institute there: "Honestly, as a Chongqing resident, I don't wish for this dam to be built."
Financial havoc
At the very least, silt could wreak havoc with the dam's costs.
Lowering the reservoir's water level to flush silt means less power generation, which means less revenue for a project already hard-pressed to pay its way. And less revenue makes it harder to tap foreign investors, from whom China needs billions of dollars for Three Gorges.
That hasn't stopped international investment bankers eager to cultivate lucrative ties with Beijing -- among them, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley -- from clamoring to help China find foreign financing for the project.
But Three Gorges investors may need inordinate faith. A $1 billion stock sale, expected next year, may try to raise money for the dam by an unusual method -- by selling stock in another Yangtze dam, Gezhouba, which already is sending its own profits to the Three Gorges project.
"International investors won't see any return for many, many years," says a Western banker in Beijing. "They'd be crazy to put their money into Three Gorges."
That's just part of the dam's financial problems. More problems likely will come from its spiraling costs -- already evident at the onset of the enormous resettlement effort, which is to take one-third of the project's budget.
Cities and counties along the Upper Yangtze expect the project to give them new bridges, highways, airports and telecommunications equipment. At factories that will be flooded, managers are counting on receiving new buildings and equipment.
In the isolated city of Wanxian -- where the Yangtze will bury the homes of a half-million residents, about half of all those to be moved by the dam -- the project is viewed as a long overdue cash cow.
At Wanxian Local Products, a simple warehouse where young women make bamboo bed mats, manager Zhang Yan has big plans. He expects Three Gorges to buy his company a new factory worth 50 percent more than his riverfront facility.
"We're very lucky," he admits. "All the people in the Three Gorges want to catch this chance."
Why not? Wanxian's first resettled factory, the May 1st soap company, spent $4.6 million on a grand new plant with room for five times more workers and 10 times more production.
"The first to move has more advantages," brags May 1st manager Wen Chuanshu. "You have to know when to take a chance economically and politically."
That's likely a very bad omen for the hundreds of thousands of less nimble and less well-connected peasants and workers whose new lives will depend on the state's largess.
At best, most of them can only hope not to cash in on the rising water, just survive it. So they can only view the project with a certain fatalism.
As a shoe store clerk in Wanxian puts it: "Whether or not the money's enough, the water's still coming, and there's nothing we can do about it."