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Yangtze River - 1995
Yangtze River - 1995
Jacek Pałkiewicz2006-06-18 21:30:25
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parallel effort to eliminate opposition to the dam - an effort that led to her 10-month imprisonment for exposing the risks behind the project.
As the Yangtze region inhabitants are moved, they must abandon not only their homes and land, but ancestral burial grounds and temples. With American archeologist Elizabeth Childs-Johnson and the chief of China's recovery effort, Yu Weichao, GREAT WALL explores these links to China's past. Between 80 and 90 percent of the endangered sites will be buried deep under water. Chinese archeologists, who cannot question the dam without risking their jobs, desperately plead for an international effort to save the relics.
Archeological treasures aren't the only things in need of rescue. GREAT WALL tells the story of QiQi, China's only captive freshwater dolphin, whose endangered Yangtze River brethren face certain doom when the dam is built.
Meanwhile engineers debate the technical challenges of the project. Have the Chinese engineers solved the problem of sediment build-up, or will the reservoir become choked with mud as the years pass? Even if dire scenarios fail to materialize, a slight miscalculation in sediment treatment could create financial disaster.
To many critics, the real motive behind the dam extends beyond the official line. They believe government leaders have cast the dam as a symbol of China's emergence as a major technological and economic superpower. The critics say that from the government's perspective, the dam must be completed as a matter of national honor. But will saving face condemn China to fiscal and ecological catastrophe? Each day that the project moves forward, turning back becomes more costly and politically risky.
Throughout history, people have been drawn to the Yangtze River for trade, transport and spiritual pilgrimage, making it a Mecca for travelers from around the world.
The third longest river in the world, the
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See photographs from:
China Gallery
