CHINA: China yesterday began destroying the first of 22 cities to make way for the final stages of the controversial $25 billion Three Gorges Dam project. The cities will be submerged under rising waters when the world's largest hydroelectric project is in place by 2009.
State TV broadcast live the work of demolition crews blowing up buildings in Fengjie county yesterday, a 2,300-year-old townland along the Yangtze and the first to be destroyed for the project. A major blast reduced a 3,000-sq metre office building belonging to the county's Yong'an township government to a heap of debris in seconds. Two factory buildings and a 50-metre chimney of the Fengjie County Power Plant were also blasted.
Some 1.3 million people are to be relocated to make way for the project. Many of them, like the residents of Fengjie, have been given money to move, some to cities built from scratch on higher ground while others were moved to faraway places elsewhere in the country.
However some residents forced to relocate have staged protests and some have moved back home after finding the places they were relocated to not to their satisfaction.
The project, which began construction in 1993, has been fiercely criticised both at home and abroad as impractical and an environmental disaster.
China says the dam is needed to contain the Yangtze's devastating floods and to meet future power demand. But critics say the project, first planned decades ago, is not a practical solution to either problem and could cause severe pollution and silting by slowing the river's flow.
Much of the dam has been built and it is expected to begin holding back water on China's longest river, the Yangtze, in June of next year.
Yesterday's demolition and excavation began what the official Xinhua news agency called the "urgent task" of clearing the reservoir bed for flooding scheduled to begin in 2003.