NEW YORK, January 5 – Official Chinese news agencies have reported that Beijing has decided to revive the stalled project to build 13 dams on Salween River (known as Gyalmo Nyulchu in Tibetan and Nu Juiang in Chinese).
The first of these dams, Liuku, will be built this year.
Last year, Premier Wen Jiabao ordered a halt to the project until more “science-based studies were conducted” to determine its environment fallouts.
But, Chinese social scientists from Southwest Nationalities Study Association and other organizations, according to a report, were bribed to submit papers to advise the government to go ahead with the project.
The papers, according to this report, were written for 6,000 RMB apiece, and that they were not based on ground level investigation and research.
The region where the dam-building is planned is home to old-growth forests, some 7,000 species of plants and 80 rare or endangered animal species.
At least a fourth of China’s indigenous plant species and half of its native animal species can be found here, including the snow leopard, New York Times reported in 2003.
Amongst other things, the damming will force the relocation of 50,000 people in Yunnan, many of them Tibetans, and other ethnic minorities such as Lisu, Nu, and Drung.
In 2003, China’s State Environmental Protection Agency and the Chinese Academy of Sciences publicly criticized this project.
Similarly, non-governmental environmental organization, Chongqing Green Volunteer Union, collected 15,000 petition signatures opposing the dams.
Chinese environmentalists warn that if this region is destroyed, “China will have nowhere left unspoiled for future generations”.
But the country’s insatiable thirst for energy and the equally insatiable greed of its well-connected contractors seem to have won the day once again, as they have over and over again during the past couple of decades.
This reminds us of a street talk in Tibet: If you have money and backdoor connections in “socialist China”, you can buy everything… even the People’s Liberation Army itself.
While this may be a hyperbole, one can say that social justice is indeed a no-no concept there, a discreet taboo.
One can also venture to say that this “Marxist State” acts as if its fundamental ideology is to safeguard the vested interests of Mammon-worshipping nouveau riche, all because they are the families and cronies of top leaders in the Chinese Communist Party and the People’s Liberation Army.
