Cultural Geography of China: Three Gorges

Check out how mountainous this place is. Then look at precipitation and population, and you'll see that people don't live where the water is. As Mark Twain noted for the the American West, water in much of China is for fighting, and Wiskey (make that Baijiu, 白酒, or rice liquor) is for drinking. (Maps from U. Texas Library http://lib.utexas.edu).

One begins to understand that water, water pollution, flood control and emergency response, community resettlement and development, transportation, and even tourism in the context of the Three Gorges Dam along the Chang Jiang （长江 aka Yangtze in the west) presents enormous technical and management problems for China. The dam was born of an American engineer's dream.

Preventing the dream from creating a series of nightmares will depend on the sort of shared and global effort that is, in fact, forging new links between China and the rest of the world as we all wrestle with enormous environmental challenges—and opportunities, too. Channel 4 in the UK produced a short documentary on the dam. It is worth a look.

Meanwhile, Chinese cinema offers its own documentary and dramatic treatment of the human and environmental issues along the Yangtze. Still Life, the 2006 film by Jia Zhangke, is the most recent (and famously beautiful and troubling) example. The Chinese government is well aware of the issues—so much so that they have encouraged documentary filmmaking about this mega-project and its consequences.

The great western desert is encroaching on the urban centers of the northeast, partly due to formerly uncontrolled grazing in Inner Mongolia, partly due to climate change; massive tree-planting and land reclamation seem to be helping. But winter-time dust-storms in Beijing are famous for their breathtaking grit and intensity. Fresh water is a problem here as it has always been. The need for water control is as old as the Chinese state.

Recall that the worlds largest ancient canal in the world, the Dà Yùnhé or Grand Canal, dates to the 5th century. Water control like the canal—and like the three gorges dam—became the seminal model for German historian (and one-time communist) Karl Whittfogel as he linked water control to the Marxist concept of an Asiatic Mode of Production. (In so doing, Whittfogel got himself drummed out of the first communist international—he later decided communism was not such a great idea; his book, Oriental Despotism is still considered historically and epistemologically suspect, as is the notion 'Asiatic Mode of Production', but that's another story.)

The point is that part of China is very dry and part of it is very wet. It is a country that runs on water—water for cities, for transportation, for agriculture—and a country that suffers every year from too much water in the wrong places at the wrong times. Floods kill a lot of people every year in China (though their emergency response to flooding is among the best in the world by some accounts).

So water control is always complex business: the people upstream can turn off the water on the people downstream (or flood the daylights out of them). That fact alone means that complex irrigation or water-control projects, when operated by complex state systems, does indeed go along with complex systems of power. In that respect, the Los Angeles Aqueduct in California is not much different than the Grand Canal. Born of the infelicitous combination of a dry geography and big, urban populations, both the Grand Canal and the California water systems have spawned political and hand-to-hand fighting as well as cinema like Chinatown and one of the recommended films for this class, Still Life.