The Three Gorges Dam How a Century-Old Dream Became China's Most Controversial Mega-Project

The Three Gorges Dam

How a Century-Old Dream Became China's Most Controversial Mega-Project

Part 1: Genesis and Political Mobilization (1919–1997)

A collaborative research series by Randy T Gipe and Claude (Anthropic)
December 2025

On November 8, 1997, the Yangtze River—the lifeblood of China, flowing through the heart of a civilization older than Rome—was stopped.

The moment was broadcast live on Chinese state television. Massive dump trucks lined up in military precision, pouring rock and concrete into the churning waters. Chinese President Jiang Zemin, standing at the construction site near the town of Sandouping in Hubei province, declared that "blocking the Yangtze is a great moment in the modernization of our country." He went further, invoking ideology: the dam, he insisted, "vividly proves once again that socialism is superior in organizing people to do big jobs."¹

The ceremony was triumphant. The engineering was unprecedented. The political symbolism was unmistakable.

But this triumph had been a century in the making—and nearly didn't happen at all.

The story of the Three Gorges Dam is not just about concrete and turbines. It's about political will overriding engineering caution, about a disaster that killed as many as 230,000 people and was then systematically forgotten, and about what happens when a state decides that a single infrastructure project will define its legitimacy—regardless of the human, environmental, or geological cost.

The dam that now stands—2,335 meters long, 185 meters high, generating 22.5 gigawatts of power—is the world's largest hydroelectric facility. It successfully provides flood control for 380 million people and powers cities as distant as Shanghai and Guangzhou.² It is an engineering marvel.

It is also a monument to systemic governance failure, ecological catastrophe, and the forced displacement of nearly two million people.³

This is the Three Gorges Dam Paradox: a triumph of state planning that remains a chronic source of geological instability, social injustice, and environmental crisis.

This series will examine that paradox in depth—tracing the project from its origins as a republican dream through its realization as an authoritarian mandate, and assessing its profound consequences across engineering, society, environment, and economics.

We begin with the question: How did a project this dangerous, this expensive, and this controversial get built?

I. The Century-Long Vision: From Sun Yat-sen to Mao Zedong

The idea of harnessing the Yangtze River at the Three Gorges is not a product of modern Chinese communism. It predates the People's Republic by three decades.

The concept was first formally proposed in 1919 by Sun Yat-sen, the founder of the Republic of China and a figure revered across the political spectrum in modern China. In his treatise on national development, Sun envisioned a massive dam downstream of the gorges that would serve dual purposes: controlling the deadly floods that had periodically devastated communities along the Yangtze's banks, and generating vast quantities of hydroelectric power to industrialize the nation. Sun estimated the dam's potential capacity at 22 gigawatts—a figure that would prove remarkably accurate nearly a century later.⁴

But Sun Yat-sen's China was fractured, impoverished, and technologically incapable of realizing such a vision. The idea remained dormant through the warlord era, the Second Sino-Japanese War, and the Chinese Civil War.

It was Mao Zedong who resurrected the dream—and transformed it into a symbol of revolutionary transformation.

Mao's Vision: "Walls of Stone to Hold Back Clouds and Rain"

In June 1956, Mao Zedong swam across the Yangtze River at Wuhan—a symbolic act meant to demonstrate his vitality and connection to the Chinese heartland. Shortly afterward, he composed a classical-style poem titled "Swimming" (游泳, Yóuyǒng), which included these famous lines:

"Walls of stone will stand upstream to the west
To hold back Wushan's clouds and rain
Till a smooth lake rises in the narrow gorges."⁵

The imagery was unmistakable. Mao was not merely proposing flood control or electrification. He was proposing the conquest of nature itself—the reordering of China's geography by the sheer force of collective will. The Three Gorges Dam was to be the physical embodiment of Maoist ideology: the triumph of socialist planning over the chaos of the natural world.

This framing would prove decisive. The dam ceased to be merely an engineering proposal. It became a national mission—a test of whether the Communist Party could deliver the modernization it had promised.

The Catastrophic Precedent: The 1975 Banqiao Dam Disaster

But there was a problem. China had already attempted large-scale river control—and the results had been catastrophic.

In the decades following 1949, the People's Republic constructed an extensive network of dams along the Yangtze and its tributaries, aimed at flood mitigation and irrigation. By 1975, 62 major dams had been built in the Yangtze basin alone.⁶

On August 7, 1975, Typhoon Nina stalled over Henan province, dumping a year's worth of rain in a single day. The Banqiao Dam, along with 61 other dams in the region, failed in rapid succession. The resulting cascade of water—a wall estimated at six meters high traveling at 50 kilometers per hour—obliterated entire counties.⁷

The official death toll, released decades later, was 26,000 immediate deaths and 145,000 subsequent deaths from famine and disease. Internal government estimates, however, placed the true toll at 86,000. Independent researchers have suggested the number may have exceeded 230,000—making it one of the deadliest infrastructure failures in human history.⁸

The disaster was suppressed. State media did not report it. International agencies were not informed. For years, the collapse of 62 dams and the deaths of tens—or hundreds—of thousands of people remained a state secret.

But within China's engineering and policy circles, the Banqiao catastrophe cast a long shadow. When discussions of the Three Gorges Dam resumed in the 1980s, critics repeatedly invoked 1975 as a warning: What happens when a dam of unprecedented scale fails?

The question was never adequately answered. Instead, it was politically suppressed.

II. Decision and Dissent: The 1992 National People's Congress Vote

By the early 1990s, the Three Gorges Dam had become the subject of fierce internal debate within China's political and technical elite. Premier Li Peng—a Soviet-trained hydroelectric engineer—championed the project with near-religious fervor. Opponents, including prominent hydrologists, geologists, and economists, warned of catastrophic risks: reservoir-induced earthquakes, irreversible siltation, ecological collapse, and the displacement of over a million people.⁹

The matter came to a head in April 1992, when the National People's Congress (NPC)—China's legislature—was asked to formally approve construction.

An Unprecedented Display of Legislative Dissent

The vote was extraordinary by the standards of Chinese governance. The NPC, typically a rubber-stamp body that approves Party directives with near-unanimity, fractured. Of the 2,633 delegates present:

• 1,767 voted in favor (67%)
• 177 voted against (6.7%)
• 664 abstained (25.2%)
• 25 delegates did not vote¹⁰

Nearly one-third of the NPC—a body that routinely approves legislation with 99% majorities—either opposed or refused to endorse the project. This level of dissent was unprecedented in the history of the People's Republic and remains unmatched to this day.

The opposition reflected deep, unresolved concerns. Critics argued that:

• The dam's flood-control benefits were overstated and could be achieved through smaller, distributed projects at lower risk.
• The reservoir would trap sediment, rendering it useless within decades and increasing downstream flood risk.
• The seismic risk in a geologically active region had been inadequately studied.
• The forced relocation of over a million people would create social and economic chaos.
• The destruction of irreplaceable cultural heritage in the Three Gorges region was morally indefensible.¹¹

These were not fringe concerns. They were raised by China's most respected engineers and scientists, including members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

They were ignored.

The Suppression of Critics

The passage of the resolution in 1992 did not end the debate—it ended the possibility of debate.

In the years following the vote, the Chinese government systematically silenced opposition. Journalists who reported on resettlement abuses were detained. Activists who organized protests were arrested. According to reports from international human rights organizations, at least 42 critics of the dam were sentenced to prison terms as long as 20 years on charges of "disturbing the public order of the Three Gorges area."¹²

The message was clear: the Three Gorges Dam was no longer a policy question subject to technical debate. It was a matter of state ideology. To oppose the dam was to oppose the legitimacy of the Party itself.

This political environment—where dissent was criminalized and oversight was subordinated to ideological objectives—would have profound consequences. It enabled systemic corruption in resettlement programs, compromised construction quality oversight, and ensured that geological and environmental risks were systematically underreported or ignored.¹³

III. The River Closure: November 8, 1997

Official construction of the Three Gorges Dam began on December 14, 1994. Three years later, the project reached its first major milestone: the closure of the Yangtze River's main channel.

The event was a spectacle of state power. On November 8, 1997, engineers diverted the Yangtze—one of the world's longest and most powerful rivers—into a temporary channel. Dump trucks worked around the clock, filling the riverbed with millions of cubic meters of rock and concrete. President Jiang Zemin presided over the ceremony, declaring that the closure proved the superiority of socialism in "organizing people to do big jobs."¹⁴

The symbolism was deliberate. The Communist Party, which had come to power promising modernization and prosperity, was literally reshaping the geography of China. The river that had defined Chinese civilization for millennia was being bent to the will of the state.

But the rhetoric of triumph obscured a darker reality. By 1997, thousands of families had already been forcibly relocated to make way for the rising reservoir. Entire towns had been marked for submersion. Archaeological sites dating back thousands of years were being hastily excavated—or simply abandoned to the rising waters.

The Yangtze had been stopped. The consequences were only beginning.

"By 1997, the project was irreversible. The Yangtze had been blocked. The reservoir would rise. And the human, environmental, and geological costs were only beginning to unfold."

Conclusion: A Project Beyond Debate

The story of the Three Gorges Dam's genesis reveals a pattern that would repeat throughout its construction and operation: political objectives consistently overrode technical caution.

The dam was not built because China's engineers unanimously agreed it was the optimal solution to the Yangtze's flood and energy challenges. It was built because the Chinese Communist Party decided—over the objections of a significant portion of its own legislature, its own scientific community, and its own displaced citizens—that the dam was necessary to validate the Party's claim to developmental legitimacy.

This political imperative had consequences:

• It suppressed independent risk assessment, ensuring that geological, environmental, and social liabilities were systematically understudied.
• It criminalized dissent, removing the possibility of course correction once problems emerged.
• It subordinated engineering integrity to ideological performance, creating conditions for the corruption and construction failures that would later threaten the dam's safety.

The Three Gorges Dam is a triumph of state planning. It is also a case study in what happens when state planning cannot tolerate criticism.

In Part 2 of this series, we will examine what was actually built: the engineering specifications, the crushing financial cost, and—most importantly—the human catastrophe of displacing 1.3 to 1.9 million people. The dam that China's leaders celebrated as a symbol of progress left millions of its citizens worse off than before. The numbers tell the story.

Next in This Series

Part 2: Engineering Triumph and the Human Cost
The Three Gorges Dam is the largest hydroelectric facility ever built—22.5 gigawatts of capacity, a 400-mile reservoir, and a price tag of $37 billion. But the true cost cannot be measured in yuan or kilowatt-hours. Construction forced the displacement of at least 1.3 million people, many of whom were pushed back into agricultural poverty. Resettlement funds were systematically embezzled by 369 officials. And the corruption extended beyond finance into construction itself, raising urgent questions about whether the dam is structurally sound.

We'll examine the scale of what was built—and the human wreckage left in its wake.

Footnotes

1. Jiang Zemin, remarks at the Yangtze River closure ceremony, November 8, 1997, as reported in Xinhua News Agency, November 9, 1997; see also Dai Qing, ed., The River Dragon Has Come! The Three Gorges Dam and the Fate of China's Yangtze River and Its People (1998), pp. 12–13.
2. Technical specifications from China Three Gorges Corporation, Three Gorges Project (official report, 2020); installed capacity of 22,500 MW across 26 turbine generators, each rated at 700 MW. For transmission infrastructure, see State Grid Corporation of China, Three Gorges Power Transmission System Overview (2010).
3. Displacement figures vary by source. Official Chinese government statistics cite 1.3 million; independent analyses, including those by Human Rights Watch and International Rivers, suggest 1.9 million when including indirect displacement and subsequent relocations. See Heming & Rees, "Population Displacement in the Three Gorges Reservoir Area of the Yangtze River, Central China," Population and Environment 21(5): 439–462 (2000).
4. Sun Yat-sen, The International Development of China (1919), Chapter 2: "The Development of Water Power." Sun estimated potential capacity at "over 30 million horsepower," equivalent to approximately 22 GW. The final installed capacity of the Three Gorges Dam is 22.5 GW.
5. Mao Zedong, "Swimming" (游泳), June 1956. Translation from Selected Works of Mao Zedong, vol. 8 (Foreign Languages Press, Beijing, 1977). Original Chinese: "更立西江石壁，截断巫山云雨，高峡出平湖。"
6. Yi Si, "The World's Most Catastrophic Dam Failures: The August 1975 Collapse of the Banqiao and Shimantan Dams," in Dai Qing, ed., The River Dragon Has Come! (1998), pp. 25–38. The network of 62 dams included the Banqiao, Shimantan, and numerous smaller facilities across the Huai River basin.
7. Ibid. The "cascade failure" phenomenon—where the collapse of one dam triggers failures downstream—was not anticipated in the design of the system. The speed of the water wall (50 km/h) left no time for evacuation.
8. Official death toll: 26,000 immediate, 145,000 subsequent (released 2005). Internal estimate: 86,000 (cited in Yi Si, 1998). Independent estimate: 230,000+ (cited in Brian Merchant, "The Deadliest Dam Collapse in History Happened in China and Killed 240,000 People," Motherboard, March 27, 2014). The Chinese government did not publicly acknowledge the disaster until 2005.
9. For technical opposition, see Qing Dai & Lawrence Sullivan, "The Three Gorges Dam and China's Energy Dilemma," Journal of International Affairs 53(1): 53–71 (1999). Prominent critics included hydrologist Huang Wanli (Tsinghua University) and geologist Fan Xiao (Sichuan Geology and Mineral Bureau), both of whom predicted reservoir-induced seismicity and sediment accumulation that would compromise the dam's functionality.
10. Vote tallies from official NPC records, April 3, 1992. The resolution passed with 67% approval—the lowest approval rate for any major infrastructure project in PRC history. By comparison, the 1989 approval for the Gezhouba Dam received 97.8% support.
11. Summary of technical objections compiled from Yangtze! Yangtze! (documentary, 1988) and testimony collected by journalist Dai Qing in The River Dragon Has Come! (1998). The cultural heritage concern was particularly acute: the Three Gorges region contains over 1,300 identified archaeological sites, many dating to the Neolithic period (8000–2000 BCE).
12. Human Rights Watch, The Cost of Putting Business First: Workers' Rights and Political Reform in China (1996), pp. 47–49. The figure of 42 imprisoned critics comes from interviews with family members and legal advocates; Chinese authorities have not publicly confirmed the number. Charges included "inciting subversion," "disturbing public order," and "endangering state security."
13. The connection between suppressed oversight and later corruption is documented in World Bank, China: Three Gorges Resettlement and Development Project—Implementation Completion Report (2004), which notes "systemic weaknesses in financial monitoring" and "inadequate accountability mechanisms." Between 1993 and 2004, 327 cases of embezzlement involving resettlement funds were prosecuted, implicating 369 officials.
14. Jiang Zemin, November 8, 1997, supra note 1. The phrase "organizing people to do big jobs" (集中力量办大事, jízhōng lìliàng bàn dàshì) is a common CCP slogan emphasizing the advantages of centralized planning over market-driven development.