Friday, September 26, 2003
SLUMS FROM THE QING DYNASTY ARE STILL SLUMS. David Stanway offers a contrarian view of the much criticized Three Gorges Dam on the Yangzi river in China.
He also notes that
Those having to live in the vast majority of the world's farming communities seem to have a different impression, however. Below one of the temples that have been constructed on the high hills along the Yangtze, a gang of withered little men with ropes of muscle on their arms and legs offer to carry my bloated Western body up to the top for just over a dollar, prompting a minor ethical dilemma: do we accept, and reinforce all the negative imagery of foreign imperialists exploiting the Chinese peasantry, or do we reject, and deprive him of a living?
Whatever. For them, it is difficult to get sentimental about the back-breaking labour and the pitiful annual income. And nor is it all that easy to get nostalgic in a puerile Lawrencian way about the violence of nature when a bloody great flood has just demolished your house and soiled your crops.
The fact that conservationists seek to preserve ways of life that need to be swept away – slums, whether they date from the Qing Dynasty or the Great Leap Forward, are still slums – seems to miss the point entirely. The fact that people are being driven out of subsistence farming and forced to participate in the urban spread is painful, but does not mean that their previous ways of life are worth keeping.
The Three Gorges Dam can be criticized, but not because it is devastating the natural balance in the region: the Yangtze itself has already done far too much of that.
He also notes that
Thousands have lived according to nature in the Three Gorges region. Over the past century, 300,000 people were swept to their deaths by floods, and millions have been made destitute. "Indifferent beyond measure," the Yangtze's last great binge of terror took place in 1998. The death toll reached 4,000.So, once again we are left with the tension between modernizing developments that may save lives but harm, often irreparably, traditional ways of life. Which is more important?
