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Building China's 'temples of doom'

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The Chernobyl of the dam-building industry - the world's biggest dam catastrophe - killed 230,000 people in Henan in 1975. And no one outside China knew.

China has built more dams and moved more people than any other country and is still engaged in a massive effort that dwarfs anything else being undertaken in the world. Even in 1986, China had built 18,820 large dams, compared with 5,459 in the United States and 3,000 in the former Soviet Union.

An astonishing 30 million Chinese have been forced out of their homes by this gigantic undertaking - that is half the number evicted worldwide.

The damming of China's rivers is so part and parcel of the history of communism on the mainland that without understanding this story, it is hard to fully appreciate what has happened in the country during the past 50 years. In the US, which led the world in dam construction, the industry has practically come to a standstill and amid fierce lobbying some of the dams are being pulled down. In China under Prime Minister Li Peng, who studied dam building in the Soviet Union, the industry is reaching its apogee this year.

In the autumn, Chinese engineers will divert the waters of the Yangtze and the Yellow rivers, two of the greatest feats of this kind in Chinese history.

Most attention has focused on the Three Gorges Dam, but China is building many more huge structures often with the support of the World Bank and international engineering giants hungrily seeking new work. Inside China, these projects are rarely questioned.

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