Analysis: China should face global damnation for river damage

China’s frenzied dam-building hit a wall recently in Burma, where the government’s bold decision to halt a controversial Chinese-led dam project helped to ease the path to the first visit by a US secretary of state to that country in more than half a century.

The now-stalled $3.6 billion (£2.3bn) Myitsone Dam, at the headwaters of Burma’s largest river, the Irrawaddy, was designed to pump electricity exclusively into China’s power grid, despite the fact that Burma suffers daily power outages.

The Burmese decision shocked China’s government, which had begun treating Burma as a reliable client state.

China remains the world’s biggest dam builder at home and abroad. Indeed, no country has built more dams than China, which boasts more dams than the rest of the world combined.

Before the Communists came to power in 1949, China had only 22 dams of any significant size. Now the country has more than half of the world’s roughly 50,000 large dams, defined as at least 15 metres high or having a storage capacity of more than three million cubic metres.

According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, China’s dams had the capacity to store 562.4 cubic kilometres of water in 2005, 20 per cent of the country’s renewable water resources. Since then, China has built scores of dams, including the world’s largest: the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River.

China is also the global leader in exporting dams. Its state-run companies are building more dams overseas than all global rivals put together.

China’s declared policy of “non-interference in domestic affairs” actually serves as a virtual licence to pursue dam projects that flood lands and forcibly uproot people – including, as with Myitsone, ethnic minorities – in other countries. But it is doing the same at home by shifting its focus from dam-saturated internal rivers to the international rivers that originate in the Tibetan plateau, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, and Manchuria.

China contends that its role as the global leader in exporting dams has created a “win-win” situation for host countries and its own companies. But evidence from a number of projects shows that the dams exact a serious environmental toll on those hosts.

As a result, the overseas projects often serve to inflame anti-Chinese sentiment, reflected in grassroots protests at several sites in Asia, Africa and Latin America. And by using a Chinese workforce to build dams and other projects abroad, China reinforces a perception that it is engaged in exploitative practices.

As the world’s most dammed country, China is already the largest producer of hydropower globally, with a generating capacity of more than 170 gigawatts. Yet ambitious plans to boost its hydro-generating capacity significantly by damming international rivers have embroiled the country in water disputes with most neighbours, even North Korea.

More broadly, China’s dam-building passion has spawned two key developments.

First, Chinese companies now dominate the global hydropower equipment export market. Second, the state-run hydropower industry’s growing clout has led the government to campaign aggressively for overseas dam projects by offering low-interest loans to other governments. At home, it recently unveiled a mammoth $635bn investment programme in water infrastructure over the next decade, more than a third of which will be channelled into building dams, reservoirs, and other supply structures.

China’s over-damming of rivers and its inter-river and inter-basin water transfers have wreaked havoc on ecosystems, causing river fragmentation and depletion and promoting groundwater exploitation beyond the natural replenishment capacity.

The social costs have been even higher, a fact reflected in Chinese prime minister Wen Jiabao’s stunning admission in 2007 that, since 1949, China has relocated 22.9 million Chinese to make way for water projects.

With China now increasingly damming transnational rivers, the new projects threaten to “export” the degradation haunting China’s internal rivers. The time has come to exert concerted external pressure on China to rein in its dam frenzy and embrace international environmental standards.

• Professor Brahma Chellaney is the author of Asian Juggernaut and the newly published Water: Asia’s New Battleground