Time has a way of leaving grand dreams in its wake. Mao Zedong envisioned a 'great plan' in poetry after swimming across the Yangtze River, at Wuhan, and that project would come to be known as the Three Gorges Dam. Fifty-three years after the chairman predicted it would, the walls of stone have indeed changed the world, at least along the river's banks. But they have done so in unanticipated ways, with losses and gains experienced up and down stream.
Many argue the Three Gorges Dam has delivered, albeit controversially, on two of its promises - flood control and electricity generation. But the third goal - to establish a water highway, a transportation artery to help develop the nation's poor interior provinces - seems largely unrealised and irrelevant to the economy growing along the Yangtze.
IT'S MID-MORNING ON a Monday and three small ships have entered the first of five locks that will lift them more than 60 metres, to the upriver reservoir of the Three Gorges Dam. It takes 31/2 hours for each vessel to pass through the lock system. They are the only ships in the upriver locks and there are none at all in the downriver ones. And none are waiting to enter the locks on either side.
An official for China Yangtze Power, which runs the dam, says he doesn't know how many ships use the locks each day. But figures for last year show that 60.89 million dead-weight tonnes (dwt) of shipping passed through them, in both directions. This is about 166,822 dwt a day, which equates to 17 small ships or one large container vessel, which the locks couldn't handle, anyway (the upper size limit for ships using the locks is 6,000 dwt, which is relatively small).
Traffic is sparse along the 650-kilometre stretch of the Yangtze between Yichang, in Hubei province, close to the dam, and Chongqing. The odd small coal, oil or sulphur barge chugs past while others carry iron piping or lumber. There is the occasional small container ship and one carrying trucks.
Just upstream from the dam, commercial vessels are outnumbered by ageing Russian hydrofoil ferries and the numerous triple- or quadruple-deck cruise ships that take tourists through the Three Gorges. The gorges are not as spectacular as they were before the dam turned the Yangtze into a placid waterway, but tourists still marvel at the soaring cliffs of Qutang Gorge, the way clouds envelop the peaks, the waterfalls that tumble hundreds of metres down the mountainsides and the terraced farms that cling to the edges.
The Yangtze corridor above the dam is growing rapidly - but that's largely owing to development policies - and the impact of the dam is felt not so much by its capabilities as a waterway as by the changes caused by its construction. The displacement of hundreds of thousands of people and the building of towns, roads and railways along the river have been a huge economic engine.