After nearly 70 years of indecision, China has decided to build the
world’s largest dam, across the Yangtze River.

A summer of floods and the continuing ascendancy of Marxist planners
in Beijing have combined to defeat objectors to the scheme.

An early start to the Three Gorges Dam is now seen as ‘inevitable’ in
order to control flooding in central and eastern China, according to a report
by the Minister of Water Conservancy, Yang Zhenhuai. Last month he presented
the report to a committee of China’s nominal parliament, the National People’s
Congress. It won the backing of congress chairman Wan Li, who called for
the dam’s construction to be included in China’s next 10-year development
plan, which begins this year.

China’s cabinet, the State Council, is expected to give the go-ahead
to start construction later this year. Once approved, the decision is certain
to be rubber-stamped by the congress next spring.

The dam will create a lake nearly twice the area of the Isle of Wight.
It is known to be the pet project of the Chinese premier, Li Peng, who was
trained as an engineer.

This summer’s floods along the Huai River – a tributary of the Yangtze
– and around Tai Lake were reportedly the worst this century. In July, water
covered more than 20 million hectares of farmland – an area close to that
of England and Scotland combined. More than 2000 people died and a million
were made homeless.

Hardline Communist leaders have used the crisis to justify centralised
control. Flood management has been given high priority within the new development
plan. The New China News Agency says some £24 billion will be available
for dams, dykes and irrigation through the 1990s. At least 10 dams are planned
to harness China’s major rivers, including the Yellow River, the Pearl River,
the Min Jiang and the Li Shui.

The Three Gorges Dam is the centrepiece of plans to control flooding
along the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze. Its 26 generating units
will produce 84 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity a year, equivalent
to one-sixth of China’s electricity output.

Planners have blamed flooding and poor agricultural production on the
failure to push ahead with large water projects. Causes such as deforestation
along the upper reaches of the Yangtze and in Tibet have largely been ignored.

Opposition to the project from scientists and environmentalists has
been quashed by the political crackdown that began in Tiananmen Square.
Among the most prominent opponents of the scheme was the journalist Dai
Qing, who was jailed for 11 months for her support of the 1989 student movement.
Opponents warned that the project will be an environmental disaster, upsetting
the ecological balance in the Yangtze gorges – one of China’s most famous
areas of natural beauty.

The project will require up to 1.7 million people to be resettled and
the cost of building it is expected to be £6.6 billion.

LIVING with Schizophrenia presents a modern professional view of the
mental illness that strikes 1 per cent of our population and affects many
more through family association. It is a handbook, a survival kit for those
who have to live with it. The book does not pretend to offer any new scientific
insight into the problem; it makes clear that schizophrenia remains largely
an enigma. There is no one clearly identified cause or cure. But Brenda
Lintner gives hope to newcomers trying to come to terms with the disease,
whether sufferers (if they have regained enough control of the thought process
to digest the book) or the families who will bear the brunt of support.
She outlines where progress has been made in understanding and treating
this complex medical condition.

The symptoms, of disordered thinking and feeling, delusions and hallucinations,
are attributed to a physical malfunctioning in the brain. Though the exact
causes and nature of this are not fully understood, modern drugs and management
of care can control the symptoms.

The scientific evidence she presents reassures sufferers that the days
are long gone when they would be banished forever to barrack-style asylums.
Most people can now live reasonably normal lives within the community. About
a quarter can make a complete recovery, though interestingly, she says,
this proportion has not increased since the advent of treatment, only the
timescale of recovery and the ability to control the illness in chronic
sufferers have improved significantly.

Lintner provides a clear guide to the new vocabulary those affected
will be bombarded with and maps out the type of help they can expect. She
also discusses the medical ‘tools’, their roles and benefits, including
psychotropic and neuroleptic drugs, the mainstay of most programmes of treatment,
as well as counselling and group and family therapy. She also encourages
the acceptance of less orthodox approaches, such as control through a gluten-free
diet.

The book also deals helpfully with practical questions, such as whether
a recovered schizophrenic can continue education or plan to have a baby.
Particularly useful is the clear presentation of the state benefits the
patient and family might be entitled to in Britain, as well as their legal
rights.

Lintner mentions the more sensitive political issues related to schizophrenia,
in particular the lack of adequate facilities for community care following
the closure of most of the old mental hospitals, and the fact that many
long-term sufferers might be better suited to life in an institution than
having to fend for themselves or be dependent on their families. But in
her attempt not to alarm, Lintner largely glosses over these issues.

For those who know too much about the illness, who have come up against
one brick wall after another during an endless cycle of breakdown and partial
recovery, this guide offers little new by way of insight of sources to help.
The patient may hope to be returned to society in between breakdowns, but
no one should underestimate the struggle to find a meaningful life, job
and friends. The book offers little advice to the many who are failing in
that effort because of the nature of the disease, the long-term effect it
has had on their personality and how ‘normal’ people react to them. They
are too often left neither ill nor well, the ‘problem cases’ on every psychiatrist’s
patient list.

In trying to reassure, Lintner’s book divorces itself from some of the
harrowing realities many families experience. She talks of how suffer’s
are likely to ‘withdraw from social contact’, rather than addressing head
on the more fundamental, hurtful and exacerbating behavioural problems that
frequently accompany the disease.

Families of chronic schizophrenics still live close to despair and are
in much need of help, from science and community care. This book does not,
and probably cannot, present many of the fundamental answers for which they
are looking.

Katherine Forestier is a freelance science journalist.

The authorities have pinpointed Stone as a symbol of the ‘counter-revolution’.
The company, founded five years ago, rapidly became the vanguard of China’s
computer industry and, in its management style, established itself as a
model for economic reform (This Week, 17 June).

Stone owed its success and its downfall to the prominent position it
played in China’s reform and to the associations it had forged with prominent
politicians. Wan had been a confidant of Zhao Ziyang, the reformist general
secretary of the Communist Party, and his supporters. But with Zhao’s fall
from grace, Stone lost its influential protector.

Wan and the other senior figures in the company had lobbied loudly for
further reforms that they believed would invigorate the economy. The reformers
saw political change as an essential prelude to economic progress. Stone
set up a unit for political research that became one of Zhao’s think-tanks.
When the student movement emerged this spring, calling for greater democracy,
press freedom and an end to corruption, Wan was one of its first backers.
He also signed petitions demanding the release of political prisoners.

A leading dissident and writer who fled the country last week said that
Wan might have reached Hong Kong. The dissident, one of a group of writers
and intellectuals who regularly joined the students in Tiananmen Square
before the army moved in, expected that Stone would be taken over by the
state. So far, he said, other independent computer companies had escaped
lightly because they were not involved with the movement for democracy.

In the meantime, Liu Binyan, the former editor of the official newspaper,
the People’s Daily, said in Hong Kong that academics had suffered most from
the government’s crackdown. ‘All the famous scholars, all the scholars with
influence – if they are not in hiding, they have fled abroad,’ he said.
Liu lives in exile in the West after the Communist Party dismissed him in
1987 for spreading ‘Western bourgeois liberal ideas’.

According to official Chinese news agencies, the authorities have arrested
more than 2000 ‘counter-revolutionaries’. Wan is one of seven named intellectuals
whose arrest warrants were published in an offical circular last week. However,
Liu and other dissidents suspect that hundreds more intellectuals who signed
petitions in support of the student movement are on a government black list.

The major universities in the capital, Beijing University and the People’s
University, remain closed and the few students left on campus elsewhere
in the country are receiving lectures dominated by political education.
The state Education Commission has ordered all local governments to arrange
‘political ideological education’ to help students to ‘love socialism’ and
‘love the army’.

Most of the 80 000 Chinese students who are studying abroad will be
seeking ways to avoid returning. The US, which has about half the total,
has said that the students can stay for at least another year.

In the short term, at least, the policy of the ‘open door’ is shutting
on science, both from outside and within. Western countries will be unwilling
to transfer sensitive technology to China. The US has already announced
a ban on the sale of arms.

Before the current crisis, economic reforms had given an unprecedented
free rein to talented Chinese scientists to go independent. About 10 000
private or cooperative companies were set up; these threw out the old bureaucratic
methodology and pursued an aggressive, and often successful, commercial
approach to science. The computer industry in particular made headway; its
fastest-growing company is the Beijing Stone Group, set up by Wan Runnan,
another of the scientists now believed to be under investigation.

If the orthodox Marxists, headed by premier Li Peng, remain in power,
this initiative is likely to come to an end. Conservatives have been complaining
that such companies have been undermining their state-owned competitors.

Economic reform was bringing its own problems and contradictions. As
the government cut subsidies to most institutions, they had to look for
new ways of supporting themselves. Most institutions have looked to short-term
commercial solutions rather than long-term research. The basic problem has
been that the commercialisation of science was being grafted on to the Stalinist
structure of the centralised science institutions.

The reform of science, engineered by the now disgraced reform school
of thought, aimed to improve the efficiency of scientists, who were previously
notorious for their lack of interest in turning research results into products.
Fixed subsidies to research institutes had been cut by between 10 per cent
and 20 per cent a year since 1986. Institutes could make up the shortfall
by applying for grants for specific projects. They also raised funds by
developing their own commercially-viable products which they have been allowed
to patent since 1987.

Many important scientific developments that are commercially viable
have been appearing as a result of the commercialisation policy. But institutes
may have to go to extraordinary lengths to find new sources of funds. The
Ocean University of Qingdao, for example, is selling long-life ice cream
made from milk and seaweed.

Many science-related industries also tap funds from subsidiaries that
have nothing to do with science. The aero-technology industry balances its
books by making sports bags, watches and radios. The Beijing Stone Group
has a tourist hotel and a trading subsidiary. Even the Chinese army owns
the largest Chinese hotel group.

Over the next three years the State Science Commission wanted about
100 000 scientists to move to companies set up under research institutes
or to collective or private companies. But a survey of 6493 large and medium-sized
enterprises revealed that the merging of research and production had not
been particularly successful. Only 1913 of the enterprises had R&D sections.
About 28 per cent said they had no money to develop technology. If research
ever resumes a normal rhythm, institutes or their own companies will be
encouraged to work with industrial units project by project.

The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), China’s main organisation responsible
for research in basic and applied sciences, has, since 1986, spawned about
200 companies to develop products and carry out contract research. The proportion
of projects that resulted in marketable products had increased from between
20 per cent to between 50 and 70 per cent.

The Keli Corporation, founded under CAS in 1985, carried out R&D
projects in signal processing technologies and was one of the most successful
of the CAS companies. It joined other research and production units to form
the Keli Group, with a staff of 5000.

The policy of commercialisation had had some successes: they include
the development of word processing and typesetting systems using Chinese
characters, and magnetic materials made from rare earths. Adaptations of
traditional Chinese medicine were particularly plentiful. Researchers have
used laser technology and electronics, for example, to stimulate acupuncture
points.

Until the exodus from the nation’s campuses, universities were the scene
of healthy trade. Beijing Agricultural University, for example, marketed
a vegetable health drink and an infrared thermometer. The Blast Technique
Development Company under the Chinese University of Mining and Technology,
offered a static demolition agent for technology transfer. Nanjing University
wanted to sell crude-looking rubber ‘intellectual head-shaped finger toys’.

Until the imposition of martial law in Beijing, areas like Zhongguancun
– a suburb of Beijing where high technology companies congregated near to
research institutes – were the hope for the future. But for scientists,
it is much more than the future of science that is at stake, but their personal
fate. China has entered a dark age grimmer than the Cultural Revolution,
when the army never turned its guns on the people.

A PROJECT to draw energy from the Yangtze River by blocking it with the largest dam in the world seems likely to proceed. It has become a focus for opposition to government policies in China. Opponents accuse ministries backing the project of ignoring warnings that the Three Gorges Dam, as it is called, could be a disaster economically, environmentally and socially.

Opponents rejoiced prematurely in January when Yao Yilin, China’s vice premier and the head of the leading group of ministers set up to consider the project, announced that the scheme would be shelved for at least five years, mainly because China lacked the money to carry it through. Weeks later, the authorities released a new statement saying that this was only his personal opinion, not official policy.

The leading group of ministers and vice ministers, set up in 1986, has now approved the project, with Yao raising no objections. Its report recommends that construction should start in 1992, to offset financial losses through inflation. The state council must now decide whether to grant final approval for the scheme. The report is based on the findings of a feasibility study carried out by more than 400 scientists and 10,000 technicians. It also draws on the conclusions of an independent study by the Canadian Development Agency.

The dam would be important to the economic development of central, eastern and southwest China, say its proponents. Twenty-six generating units would produce 84 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity every year, one-sixth of what the country produces in total today. It would thus, they say, solve the desperate shortage of power that restrains development of the country’s eastern and central provinces.

With a storage capacity of 22.1 billion cubic metres of water, the reservoir created by damming the Yangtze would also help to solve a centuries-old problem of flooding in the middle and lower reaches of the river, say the backers. And it would decongest river traffic, still a major form of transport in a country which lacks a comprehensive network of roads and railways.

However, opponents say that the price is too high. The reservoir, 175 metres deep and 650 kilometres long, would flood 630 square kilometres of land, displace up to 1.1 million people and devastate one of China’s most famous areas of natural beauty, the Three Gorges. Damage to birds, wildlife and fauna has not been calculated.

There is much debate as to the effects of the reservoir on the lower reaches of the river and on the estuary. Other uncertainties include the impact of the scheme on landslides and the outcome in the event of earthquakes. Moreover, opponents fear that the cost of the project, equal to pounds 5.6 billion, will be unacceptable in a country with a serious shortage of credit and spiralling inflation.

In 1986, the newly-published feasibility study was commissioned, this time with support from the Canadian Development Agency. More than 400 experts in 40 different disciplines carried out 14 separate studies, said to be the most comprehensive undertaken in China. The 14 studies investigated geology, seismology, hydrology, sedimentation, population, ecology, environment, project buildings, construction, investment, electrical equipment, water level and economic values.

The Canadians, backed by a steering committee representing the governments of China and Canada, as well as the World Bank, carried out an independent study which concluded that the project was feasible on technical and socioeconomic grounds.

Keith Webb, the general manager of the Canadian International Project Management Yangtze Joint Venture, said that the scheme is a ‘very economical and very favourable hydroelectric power project, in terms of the financial rate of return and economic benefits’. He added: ‘There is no other practical alternative which will achieve the same level of flood protection in the middle reaches of the Yangtze.’ Meanwhile, the people in the 19 areas affected are desperate for a decision.

Many people fear that earthquakes could destroy the dam, to be sited in a region where 21 earthquakes registering more than 4.75 on the Richter scale have been recorded this century. The new reservoir could trigger off an earthquake, causing the dam to collapse, opponents say.

Backers of the project say that this is impossible, because the nearest fault zone is 17 kilometres upstream. The feasibility study concludes that the site of the dam, at Sandoupin, offers a sound foundation of Precambrian granite rocks and a topography that suits a high dam.

The area is also prone to heavy landslides, which would threaten the stability of the dam. Geologists call for urgent studies for how to control such slides, whether the dam goes ahead or not.

Opponents say that alternatives, such as building a series of smaller dams on the Yangtze’s tributaries, deserve more consideration. They fear that if the dam silts up, its storage capacity will shrink and it may become useless within 30 years.

For 18 months, a team studied the impact of the scheme on patterns of sedimentation, using data collected by hydrological stations along the Yangtze valley over the past four decades. It concluded that most sedimentary matter is suspended and granular, with little in the way of heavy deposits. If managers operate the dam correctly, then 90 per cent of the storage capacity could be preserved indefinitely by lowering the water level behind the dam in the flood season, allowing much of the sedimentation to pass through to it from the reservoir. After the floods recede, de-creasing flows with lower levels of sediment can then be impounded and the pool raised to the normal level.

This would guarantee a flow of water during the dry sea-son. Combined with sediment from tributaries downstream, the total sand load of the river would only be reduced only slightly, if at all, says the team.

The benefits of flood control outweigh any of the disadvantages, according to the feasibility study. The valley of the Yangtze contains one-quarter of China’s farmland and supports one-third of its population. The area produces two-fifths of the country’s grain and accounts for the same proportion of China’s industrial output.

But in the middle and lower reaches, flooding is a perennial threat. In 1931, 340,000 hectares were submerged and, in 1935, 150,000 hectares. The death toll that year reached 280,000. In 1954, 3 million hectares were flooded, 30,000 people died, and the railway link between Beijing and Canton was cut for three months.

Power specialists say that the country’s supply of energy lags well behind demand. The country lacks 70 billion kilowatt-hours of power. In many areas, factories can operate on only four days a week.

And with the volume of cargo transported along the Yangtze between Shanghai and the inland city of Congqing forecast to increase from the current level of 6 million tonnes per year to 30 million tonnes by the year 2030, immediate improvement to the channel is critical, the scheme’s backers argue. Based on 1985 figures, 393,000 urban dwellers and 332,000 people from rural areas will have to move to make way for the reservoir.

An American trade official involved in a previous plan to dam the river expects the current project to do the same. He says that the state council is unlikely to approve such a large project at a time when it has ordered spending on capital construction to be slashed by one-quarter. However, the project is known to have the backing of the premier, Li Peng. Now that the leading group of ministers has given its approval, it could make it hard for the government to back down. Whatever happens, it is not going to be universally popular.