River Town_ Two Years On The Yangtze Part 5

n.o.body knows for certain when the ridge was first used in this way, but virtually all of the carvings refer to a pair of stone carp that are engraved at the bobbing waterline of the river. Each fish is nearly two feet long and they swim one after the other, heading westward, their bellies forming a line that represented the low-water mark at the time of their engraving. In the hooked mouth of the forward carp is a lotus blossom. These fish were carved sometime in the Tang Dynasty before the year 763, which is the date of the first engraved reference to their appearance. This afternoon, the level of the Yangtze is just a touch higher than the line of the carp.

The original purpose of the fish was practical rather than artistic. Never was the Yangtze more dangerous to boats than in winter, when low water exposed shoals and crags. Pilots pa.s.sing Fuling could study the White Crane Ridge, note the water level in comparison to the twin carp, and predict the condition of the river ahead. The fish swam in place; the river constantly fluctuated; the locals understood this relations.h.i.+p and it became part of the Yangtze's annual pattern.

Over the years, other dynasties left their own engravings on the ridge, most of which note the return of the Tang fish. Just above the two carp, a Northern Song Dynasty carving greets their appearance in the year 971: "The water of the river retreats. The stone fish are seen. Next year there will be a b.u.mper harvest." Ten feet higher on the ridge, time suddenly leaps three and a half centuries to 1333, when Yuan Dynasty officials note the Tang carp's return: "In Fuling the appearance of the stone fish indicates a great harvest, guarding the prefecture for the next year."

Most of the carvings follow this ritualized form-the date of the carp's sighting, followed by a harvest prediction, all of which is inscribed in the name of the emperor. Central to this ritual was the belief that the appearance of these Tang fish was a.s.sociated with harvests, and eventually the White Crane Ridge s.h.i.+fted from a navigational tool into an oracle of the mysterious and vital cycles of the natural world. And pinned through these never-ending cycles was the straight line of human history, as the representatives of emperor after emperor left their marks on the rock.

The ridge was only one of dozens of annual signs that were recorded in this way by the emperor. He was the Son of Heaven, a representative of the unspeakable forces of nature, and yet the manifestation of these same forces-an earthquake, a flood, a famine-could signal that heaven had turned against a ruler and his dynasty. The emperor embodied what he could not control and did not understand. As a result, he sought refuge in ritual, and the Fuling government officials regularly engraved the stone in the name of their ruler, despite the broken and weathered paragraphs of old that testified to lost dynasties and forgotten emperors. And the springtime rising of the Yangtze, the swollen river sweeping over the characters, gave evidence that there were forces the emperor could only watch, and that his glorious t.i.tles, like the inscriptions, were nothing more than words.

And so it goes with the Yuan. The 1333 inscription speaks optimistically of a b.u.mper harvest, but the dynasty is already on the decline, having slipped from what was the largest empire the world has ever known-the empire of Kublai Khan, the Mongol-ruled China that Marco Polo visited. But by 1333, Marco Polo is long gone, and Kublai Khan is dead, and the power of the Yuan is fading. Their officials carve bravely onto the stone, but the dynasty has only thirty-five more years before the wash of time covers it forever.

DOCKED ON THE SOUTH SIDE of the White Crane Ridge are three sampans. The boats are wood, with arched roofs of bamboo and woven reeds. Each roof is less than three feet tall at the highest point, reducing wind drag and avoiding a structure that could tip the craft, which has no keel. The boats are light and narrow, low-gunneled, with virtually no freeboard, and they are easily maneuvered in the river's current. Their design has not changed greatly since people first began carving on the rock to which the sampans are tethered. of the White Crane Ridge are three sampans. The boats are wood, with arched roofs of bamboo and woven reeds. Each roof is less than three feet tall at the highest point, reducing wind drag and avoiding a structure that could tip the craft, which has no keel. The boats are light and narrow, low-gunneled, with virtually no freeboard, and they are easily maneuvered in the river's current. Their design has not changed greatly since people first began carving on the rock to which the sampans are tethered.

Four women chat in the prow of a boat. All of them wear simple jackets of blue, and their clothes, like the boats, are dirty. They are river people who live on their sampans; for most of the year they depend on fis.h.i.+ng, but winter fish are sluggish and the owners of these crafts spend the season on the ridge. They rely on tourism, using small rowboats to ferry visitors back and forth from sh.o.r.e.

Today is a holiday and more than fifty visitors are wandering up and down the sandstone, gazing at the inscriptions. Occasionally they will ask a question of one of the eight workers stationed on the ridge, who have been sent here by the Fuling City Cultural Relics Administration. Two of these staff members have some formal education in archaeology, while the others are common workers whose job is to sell snacks, oversee the rowboats, and, for two yuan, take photographs of visitors next to the ridge's biggest carved fish.

A cold wind runs down the corridor of the river valley, and the workers huddle around their snack table, s.h.i.+vering and drinking hot tea. They watch the Yangtze closely, measuring its level every day. Undoubtedly they dream of the river rising, because whenever it covers the carvings they can return to the indoors work of their government office in town. For them, the appearance of the stone carp augurs nothing more than long cold days of exile out on the river.

To a certain degree this is appropriate, because a number of inscriptions were made by government officials who for various infractions had been exiled to Fuling. It was the sort of place that made for a good punishment-a lonely river town far from the heart of the empire, a post where communications broke down and the civilized world slipped away. One carving was mistakenly made in the name of an emperor who had actually already died. News of his pa.s.sing had not yet made its way down the Yangtze, and so local officials didn't realize that they were the subjects of a new ruler.

And while Fuling sometimes represented the end of a political career, the ridge is testimony that other pursuits could flourish here. Poetry and calligraphy were the traditional pastimes of the lonely exile, and many of the local officials left inscriptions that are works of beauty. Toward the western edge, four characters are inscribed with particular style: "The River Runs Forever." This carving's exact date is unknown; it was made sometime during the Kuomintang period, in the 1930s or 1940s, and the calligraphy's distinctive loops and curves are of the "running gra.s.s" script style. The last character, nian nian, trails off in a long straight line that points like a dagger at the river below.

Perhaps the ridge's most famous calligraphy consists of four large characters less than twenty feet from the Tang carp. These words are stacked one on top of the other, and they follow the flowing form of the "running hand" style. Moss grows green in the ruts of the inscription, which says, "Pillar Rock in Midstream."

The author, Xie Bin, was a celebrated calligrapher in the Fuling area, where his skills earned him the nickname Sacred Hand. He carved the phrase in 1881, during the Qing Dynasty, and the elegant inscription calls to mind that period more than a century ago, when the pillar rock holds steady but China is in trouble. The Opium Wars have been fought and lost; the Great Taiping Rebellion has been put down at enormous expense. European powers control ports all along the Chinese coast. Government money to modernize the navy is being diverted to build a new pleasure palace for Cixi, the Empress Dowager. Thirteen years from now, the j.a.panese will invade Korea, taking both the peninsula and southern Manchuria. But the White Crane Ridge emerges as it always has, and Fuling's Sacred Hand leaves his graceful mark.

A Russian-made hydrofoil streaks past the north side of the rock, heading toward Chongqing. The boat's wake rises and swamps the lower section of the ridge. Tourists scamper to higher ground, laughing, and the water breaks white over the characters and engraved fish. Then the waves subside, and the carvings are clear once more, and the river runs the same way it has run forever.

CHAPTER FOUR.

The Dam I TAUGHT MY WRITING CLa.s.s from a Chinese-published text called from a Chinese-published text called A Handbook of Writing A Handbook of Writing. Like all of the books we used, its political intent was never understated, and the chapter on "Argumentation" featured a model essay ent.i.tled "The Three Gorges Project Is Beneficial."

It was a standard five-paragraph essay and the opening section explained some of the risks that had led people to oppose the project: flooded scenery and cultural relics, endangered species that might be pushed to extinction, the threat of earthquake, landslide, or war destroying a dam that would hold back a lake four hundred miles long. "In short," the second paragraph concluded, "the risks of the project may be too great for it to be beneficial."

The next two sentences provided the transition. "Their worries and warnings are well justified," the essay continued. "But we should not give up eating for fear of choking." And the writer went on to describe the benefits-more electricity, improved transportation, better flood control-and concluded by a.s.serting that the Three Gorges Project had more advantages than disadvantages.

I had some moral qualms about teaching a model persuasive essay whose topic had been banned from public debate in China since 1987-this seemed a slap in the face to the very notion of argumentation. At worst it was an exercise in propaganda, and at best it didn't seem particularly sporting. But I had nothing else to work with, and the truth was that the essay, apart from its political agenda, provided a good structural model. My job was to teach the students how to write such a composition, and so I went ahead and taught it. I reckoned there was no sense in giving up eating for fear of choking.

I was punished by having that transition sentence infect my students' papers for the rest of the term. They were accustomed to learning by rote, which meant that they often followed models to the point of plagiarism. They were also inveterate copiers; it wasn't uncommon to receive the exact same paper from two or three students. There wasn't really a sense of wrong a.s.sociated with these acts-all through school they had been taught to imitate models, and copy things, and accept what they were told without question, and often that was what they did.

When I told them that the Three Gorges essay was a good model, they listened carefully and adopted its nuances in future work. I a.s.signed argumentative essays on whether students should be required to do morning exercises, and many of them opened their compositions by describing the benefits of the morning routine. After that was finished, they made their s.h.i.+ft: "But we should not give up eating for fear of choking." Even students who were writing on opposite sides of the issue used that same transition. Later I a.s.signed an argumentative essay on Hamlet's character, and they listed his shortcomings-indecisiveness, cruelty to Ophelia-and many of them seemed like good papers until suddenly that cursed sentence came from nowhere and boomed out, "But we should not give up eating for fear of choking." I came to loathe the phrase, and repeatedly I told them that it was a horrid transition, but it always reappeared. At last I gave up, consoling myself by thinking darkly of the day when the river was dammed, and the Yangtze would rise up and carry away all of the Handbooks of Writing Handbooks of Writing and smash them in the dam's seven-hundred-megawatt turbines. and smash them in the dam's seven-hundred-megawatt turbines.

That was only fancy, of course-the new reservoir would cause the river to rise, but it wouldn't climb as high as the teaching building. Some of my students said it would hardly reach the middle of the East River district, while others said it would flood the entire neighborhood, rising all the way to the college's front gates. None of them knew for certain, but they didn't seem to care. They had been told that the dam was beneficial, and that was enough.

IN TOWN I KNEW EXACTLY where the waterline of the new Yangtze would be, because there were signs that marked its future rise. One was in the old part of Fuling, painted in red on the side of a snack shop. There was another in downtown's Mid-Mountain Road, which was the second big street above the docks. where the waterline of the new Yangtze would be, because there were signs that marked its future rise. One was in the old part of Fuling, painted in red on the side of a snack shop. There was another in downtown's Mid-Mountain Road, which was the second big street above the docks.

Both of these signs said the same thing in huge red numbers: "177m." This figure represented the future water level of the reservoir, which at its maximum could be filled to an elevation of 177 meters (581 feet) above sea level. There were red signs like this in all of the Yangtze settlements, and heading downstream the numbers marched steadily up the hillsides, until at last you came to low-lying towns like Wushan, where the signs were so far above the city that nothing would be left once the dam reached full capacity in 2009.

Because Fuling lies three hundred miles upstream from the dam site, the rise of the river here won't be nearly as dramatic as in places like Wushan. But even in Fuling the red numbers foreshadow what will be a ma.s.sive change: taking the White Crane Ridge as Fuling's traditional winter benchmark, the surface of the new reservoir will be more than 130 feet above the Tang Dynasty twin carp.

Sometimes when I was in town I'd stop and watch the 177m signs for a few minutes on an average morning. Outside the snack shop, children would be playing, and stick-stick soldiers would be carrying loads up the steps, and the woman who owned the shop would have a yellow pot of bean curd steaming in her doorway. On Mid-Mountain Road there would be unemployed laborers standing with bow saws and paintbrushes, looking for work, and shoes.h.i.+ne men and small-time entrepreneurs would have their stands set up next to the sign. Everywhere I looked, it was typical, everyday life; and yet in a decade all of it would be below the level of the new reservoir. And by walking downhill I could see just how much more of the city would be affected: the majority of the old town with its buildings of tile and wood, and the entire shop district of Mid-Mountain Road and Riverside Road. They were lively parts of the city, and the people always seemed too busy to look twice at those signs. The river wasn't scheduled to start rising until 2003, which for the residents of Fuling was a long time away. They had other things to worry about.

They also had the government's promise that it would build a dike around Fuling to protect these low-lying districts. Whenever I asked people about the Three Gorges Project, they always shrugged and said that the city was going to build a 150-foot-high shuiba shuiba, a water-wall, which meant that the new dam wouldn't affect their homes. But the details of this dike seemed awfully vague. Would it surround the entire city? When would it be built? If they built a 150-foot high wall next to your home, wouldn't that be awfully dark and unpleasant? And what about safety-could you really trust the shuiba? shuiba? Whenever I asked these questions, n.o.body had any answers, and it seemed that none of them entertained such doubts. There was going to be a Whenever I asked these questions, n.o.body had any answers, and it seemed that none of them entertained such doubts. There was going to be a shuiba shuiba-that was all they knew and all that mattered. Even when I left Fuling, in the summer of 1998, construction of the dike hadn't yet begun, but still I didn't hear of any worries or concerns.

Mostly I heard the advantages of the dam, which followed the three points of my textbook's essay: electricity, flood control, and transportation. These are important issues for people in a place like Fuling, and with regard to all three the new dam will make a substantial difference. By far it will be the largest hydroelectric dam in the world, its wall roughly six times the length of the Hoover Dam's, and the Three Gorges Dam's twenty-six ma.s.sive turbines will produce 18,100 megawatts of electricity-the equivalent of ten nuclear reactors, enough energy to boost China's national output by 10 percent. The Yangtze's summer floods, which in the past six decades have killed more than 330,000 people, will be better controlled by the dam. In effect, it will turn Chongqing into a seaport, as ten-thousand-ton s.h.i.+ps-three times the size of the current limit-will be able to navigate the upper river.

This last point was of particular interest to Fuling, because the largest s.h.i.+ps will not be able to go all the way to Chongqing in all seasons. There are some narrow river pa.s.sages between the two cities, and speculation is that Fuling will become a major port to serve boats too large to reach Chongqing. This will be a significant change, as Fuling, with its lightly populated Wu River, has previously played a relatively small role in Sichuan's transportation network. More important, this new status will end the city's isolation. When I arrived in Fuling, construction had already begun on a high-speed expressway that would run to Chongqing, and there was talk of building a railroad sometime after the year 2000. For the people of Fuling these were long-awaited changes; soon their city would become something more than a forgotten river town, and they would no longer be at the mercy of the Yangtze and its slow boats.

But at the same time this begged another obvious question: Can one really believe that all of the people along the Yangtze-the boat captains, the businessmen, the flood-fearing peasants-will no longer be at the mercy of the river? Or will the river still be in control, with the stakes of disaster raised by the effort to harness the Yangtze? The dam is being constructed on an earthquake fault, and the unstable Gorges have a long history of enormous landslides that cause ma.s.sive waves. And the Yangtze isn't just water; the river carries a thousand times as much silt as the muddy Mississippi. Cities like Chongqing and Fuling spew their sewage more or less untreated into the river, as well as waste from their factories, and there is speculation that all of this filth and silt will back up behind the dam. A ten-thousand-ton s.h.i.+p won't be of much use in a four-hundred-mile-long bog.

For these and other reasons, the project has long inspired apocalyptic visions from a host of experts, both Chinese and foreign. They envision a broken dam, a silt-filled reservoir; they warn that the rising river will carry new poisons that previously had been stored on its banks. The reservoir will flood thirteen cities, 140 towns, and 1,352 villages; it will swamp 650 factories and 139 power stations. For more than ten thousand years the river valley has been home to human civilization, and all of man's endless traces, the garbage dumps and the chemical deposits, will be held stagnant in the new reservoir. And the river isn't something to be tinkered with lightly-over 350 million people live in the Yangtze's watershed, more than in America and Canada combined, one person out of every twelve on earth.

Experts warn that mercury, lead, and other poisons from the flooded areas could be carried into people's water supplies, and they fear the outbreak of endemic infections along the soggy new valley: malaria, leptospirosis, j.a.panese B encephalitis. The dam's forty thousand construction workers, all of whom are living temporary lives in temporary housing, will spread gonorrhea via the prost.i.tutes who flock to the workers' cities. AIDS could run the same course. And where will these workers go when the dam is finished?

And what about the nearly two million people, mostly peasants, who will be displaced by the new reservoir? The government has promised them benefits of jobs and land, which will cost one-third of the entire project's price tag-thirty billion dollars, according to conservative estimates. But eastern Sichuan has long been an isolated part of the country, and local officials have little direct contact with the central government. Sending huge sums of money down the river is far more likely to lead to corruption rather than efficient population transfer.

There are countless tombs, dozens of ancient temples, and many priceless cultural relics like the White Crane Ridge. What will be done with those? The ridge would be a major historical monument in most parts of the world, but there is so much history in the Three Gorges region that Fuling's carvings don't even make the A-list of threatened artifacts. Downstream is s.h.i.+baozhai, a stunning twelve-story paG.o.da from the eighteenth century, and beyond that is Yunyang's seventeen-hundred-year-old temple to Zhang Fei, a hero from the Three Kingdoms era. Both will be lost if expensive preservation measures aren't undertaken. And there are tombs of the Ba people, who lived in Fuling and the other Yangtze regions more than two thousand years ago, and whose remains have never been thoroughly studied. Little is known about them, and nothing more will be learned after their relics are flooded forever.

The dam also threatens wildlife: the Siberian crane, the cloud leopard, the finless porpoise, the Chinese alligator, the Chinese white river dolphin, the Chinese sturgeon, and 172 other species of fish. Already the development of the Yangtze, which carries 80 percent of China's river traffic, has been environmentally costly, and there are but one hundred river dolphins left. This is one of five freshwater dolphin species in the world, and for millennia it adapted to the muddy waters of the Yangtze until now it is virtually blind, relying on highly developed sonar capabilities. But today the river is full of boats, with the racket of engines growing louder every year, and the dolphin, deafened by technology and blinded by evolution, is already having trouble avoiding danger and finding mates. Ten-thousand-ton ocean vessels might finish off the species.

These points have been made throughout the decades that the dam has been considered by Chinese leaders. The project was first conceived by Sun Yat-sen in 1919, and it was seriously considered by both Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong. For the dictators it had a cla.s.sic Chinese appeal, at once pragmatic and grandiose-a way to modernize a poor country while rallying national pride, a modern-day infrastructure project on the scale of the Great Wall and the Grand Ca.n.a.l. Mao's engineers completed a full-scale survey in 1955, and they might have started construction if not for the distractions of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.

But there were always voices of dissent. Even in the 1980s, as Deng Xiaoping and Premier Li Peng moved closer to beginning actual work on the dam, it was one of the few major issues in China that could be debated publicly. Criticism was accepted, and there was no shortage of it; many experts believed that constructing a series of smaller dams on the Yangtze and its tributaries would have many of the same benefits without the risks. The debates continued until finally in 1987 the government tired of this version of democracy and silenced it. If China's leaders wanted the largest dam in the world, it would be built, regardless of the risks. None of the difficulties mattered-the silt, the earthquakes, the lost relics, the extinct species, the displaced peasants. The experts could be ignored, just as they had been ignored so many times in the past: when Mao encouraged high birth rates in the 1950s and 1960s; when the Great Leap Forward was launched; when the Cultural Revolution began. Sometimes you need decision rather than debate. There's no sense in giving up eating for fear of choking.

BUT STILL THE CRITICAL VOICES wouldn't go away. Dai Qing, a Chinese journalist who was one of the project's most vocal opponents, spent ten months in prison after publis.h.i.+ng a 1989 book condemning the dam. In 1992, Premier Li Peng pushed the National People's Congress to take a final vote on the project, which was duly approved. This was no surprise-the NPC wasn't much more than a rubberstamp a.s.sembly-but nevertheless there were signs of strong opposition, as a third of the representatives either opposed the project or abstained from voting. wouldn't go away. Dai Qing, a Chinese journalist who was one of the project's most vocal opponents, spent ten months in prison after publis.h.i.+ng a 1989 book condemning the dam. In 1992, Premier Li Peng pushed the National People's Congress to take a final vote on the project, which was duly approved. This was no surprise-the NPC wasn't much more than a rubberstamp a.s.sembly-but nevertheless there were signs of strong opposition, as a third of the representatives either opposed the project or abstained from voting.

China's first environmental lobby group was formed in response to the dam, and careful criticism continued even as work began in 1993. In August of 1996, the month I arrived in Fuling, a number of archaeologists and other professors publicly requested President Jiang Zemin to step up efforts to preserve the flood region's cultural relics. Protection work had been scheduled to begin in 1996, but nothing had yet been done, and the pet.i.tioners asked that $230 million be spent on various necessary measures: excavations, relocated temples, new museums. There were proposals to protect the island paG.o.da of s.h.i.+baozhai with a dike, and there was a plan to move Zhang Fei's temple, piece by piece, to higher ground. Tianjin University proposed building an underwater museum to house Fuling's White Crane Ridge. Tourists would access the museum via a tunnel on sh.o.r.e, and the roof of the building would rise above the new reservoir in a shape that recalled the ancient strip of sandstone.

All of these plans and complaints greatly annoyed the forces that were pus.h.i.+ng the dam forward. Wei Tingcheng, the seventy-year-old chief engineer who had spent virtually his entire professional life developing the project, scoffed at the "palaces" that archaeologists were proposing. "To tell you the truth," he said, in a 1996 interview with the New York Times New York Times, "the common people of China have such a low education level that they will not be able to enjoy these cultural relics, and only some of these experts will go to these museums."

It wasn't a particularly tactful remark, but in some ways it addressed an important issue: a country like China is accustomed to making difficult choices that Americans might not dream of considering. I thought of this every time I visited the White Crane Ridge, where I was always amazed to see the conjunction of the ancient carvings and the timeless river. Nowhere else had I felt so strongly that there are two types of history, natures and man's, and that one is a creature of cycles while the other, with mixed results, aims always at straightness-progress, development, control. And I sensed that on the Yangtze it was a particularly dangerous violation to force these together, pressing the river's cycles into stagnancy behind the long line of the dam.

But this was a poetic turn of thought, and most people in Fuling couldn't afford it. They didn't have the time or interest to visit the White Crane Ridge, and they didn't worry much about the relations.h.i.+p between man and nature. Often there were no other tourists on the ridge besides me, and the only time I ever saw a big crowd was the day I researched my story about the carvings, which was on a weekend during the Spring Festival holiday in 1998. Most people in Fuling had difficulty reading the inscriptions-the characters were of the traditional sort that had been simplified after Liberation, and all of the carvings followed the formal language that had been used by the Chinese intelligentsia before twentieth-century linguistic reforms. Even educated people often weren't interested. If you wanted to see local history, it wasn't necessary to go to the ha.s.sle of taking a boat-you could wander into the countryside and stumble upon Qing Dynasty tombs without even searching.

I was impressed that the city sent so many caretakers out to the ridge, especially since many of these workers were well enough trained to answer almost any question about the carvings' content and history. This was far more than I would have expected in a city with essentially no outside tourism, and at a historical site where often there weren't any visitors at all. It wasn't like America, where an empty and featureless late-Qing Dynasty battlefield might receive millions of dollars in funding, simply because some soldiers had fought and died there during a civil war. There was a great deal of history in China and if you protected all the ancient sites the people would have nowhere to grow their crops.

The final government decision on the proposed underwater museum hadn't yet been made, but approval seemed unlikely. The issue was sometimes covered in the Chongqing Evening Times Chongqing Evening Times, and this government-run newspaper was always careful to note that officials were also considering another option, which involved preserving the carvings by making a complete set of rubbings before the dam was built. To them, this would undoubtedly be the more practical solution-the region simply didn't have the sort of resources necessary to build an underwater exhibition chamber, and the White Crane Ridge didn't mean much to the average Fuling resident. It seemed most likely that the rubbings would be made and sent off to a distant museum, and then the flood would cover the ridge forever. Experts estimated that within ten years of the dam's completion the silt and sand of the new reservoir would erase all twelve centuries' worth of carvings.

It didn't surprise me that protecting the ridge wasn't high on the list of local priorities, but it was more striking that people in Fuling seemed just as pa.s.sive about the dam's other issues, including resettlement. Apart from the downtown area, where the dike would be constructed, there were still large numbers of people who would be displaced by the new reservoir: the residents of lower East River, the peasants at the base of White Flat Mountain, and the people who lived on the lower slopes of Raise the Flag Mountain. They were called yimin yimin-immigrants-and some of them would be moved to the new apartments that were being constructed behind our campus. This had originally been farmland, and the peasants whose fields had been taken for the construction project were compensated with discount prices on new apartments, as well as the choice between a government job and a cash settlement. The ones I spoke with had been offered six thousand yuan, and all of them had taken the cash-it was a lot of money in Fuling, a year's wages at a decent salary. They were also provided with a living stipend of seventy yuan a month, and as far as they were concerned it was a sweet package. After all, the last decade had seen plenty of Chinese leave the countryside in search of city jobs, and it didn't take a great deal of money to persuade a peasant not to be a peasant anymore. Every time I walked through the half-built complex I saw shops full of ex-peasants, playing mah-jongg and smoking Magnificent Sound cigarettes, waiting patiently for the day when the flood would drive their new neighbors up from the river's banks.

There were reports of immigrants who had not yet received their compensations, often because of corrupt officials who embezzled funds, which seemed to be a particularly serious problem in downriver cities like Wanxian. But even in these instances the most common reaction seemed to be one of quiet complaint rather than open protest. The truth is that the disruption of the dam, which seems ma.s.sive to an outsider, is really nothing out of the ordinary when one considers recent history in the local context. Within the last fifty years, China has experienced Liberation, the radical (and disastrous) collectivization of the 19581961 Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and Reform and Opening.

Fuling and the other Yangtze River towns have the additional experience of being a focal point of Mao Zedong's Third Line Project, which had an especially large influence on the region during the 1960s. The early preparations for this project started in 1950, when Mao sent Deng Xiaoping to the southwest so he could research the feasibility of moving Shanghai's military industry to remote mountain areas in Sichuan and Guizhou provinces. The American atomic bomb triggered this plan, as Mao became increasingly concerned that China's heavily concentrated defense industry was too susceptible to a U.S. attack. The Korean War accelerated the project, and eventually three-quarters of China's nuclear weapons plants were incorporated into the Third Line, as well as more than half of its aeronautics industry. The project was, as Harrison Salisbury describes it in his book The New Emperors The New Emperors, "something like that of picking up the whole of California's high-tech industry and moving it bodily to the wilds of Montana as they existed, say, in 1880."

In comparison it seems a small matter to turn the river into a lake. Much of Fuling's economy had originally come via the Third Line Project, which made the locals accustomed to ma.s.sive changes. The local Hailing factory, which now produces combustion engines for civilian use, had formerly been a defense industry plant moved from Shanghai. A few miles upstream from Fuling is the Chuan Dong boat factory, which in the old days made parts for nuclear submarines. All of the local Chang'an-brand cabs-the name means Eternal Peace-are made by a Chongqing factory that originally produced firearms for the military.

Many of the old Third Line factories had been converted in this way since Deng Xiaoping came to power and started dismantling the project in 1980. With China's foreign relations rapidly improving, the American threat seemed less serious (and, in any case, it was clear that there wasn't much protection in putting factories in places like Fuling). The Third Line had always been a huge drain on the economy; in some years as much as 50 percent of China's capital budget was spent on the project. Never before had such a ma.s.sive country reorganized its economy on such a scale-even Stalin's first Five-Year Plan couldn't compare-and according to some estimates, the Third Line did more damage to China's economy than the Cultural Revolution.

Despite its enormous scale, the project had been developed and dismantled in remarkable secrecy, as few locals in Fuling and the other Third Line towns ever had a clear notion of what was going on. They knew that commands were coming in from Beijing, and that these commands were bringing factories from Shanghai; and they also knew that all of this had a military sensitivity that required secrecy. It wasn't something you asked questions about, and after four decades of that it seemed natural enough not to ask questions about the dam. These things just came and went-just as the Chuan Dong factory, which arrived to build nuclear submarines, was subsequently converted to a boat plant, and eventually would disappear forever beneath the waters of the new Yangtze.

But even with all of this history in mind, I still found the lack of interest and concern about the dam to be remarkable. People were much better educated now than they had been in the past, and to some degree one would expect China's historical disasters to provide lessons that prevented their blind repet.i.tion. Nevertheless, it seemed clear that the dam and the fate of the lowland immigrants were not the concern of the average citizen. Once Teacher Kong and I talked about the dam during cla.s.s, and I asked if the coming changes worried him.

"No," he said, and I could see he thought it was a strange question.

"Well, is anybody worried?"

He thought for a moment. "If you're an immigrant," he said, "then maybe you'd be worried. But for most people it doesn't make any difference."

The longer I lived in Fuling, the more I realized that this was a characteristic response. It was strange, because foreign newspapers routinely printed scathing reports on the project, and there were angry critics in cities like Beijing and Shanghai. But in Fuling, where the dam would affect the people directly, there was no sign of unhappiness. In the two years I lived there, I never heard a single resident complain about the Three Gorges Project, and I heard gripes about virtually every other sensitive subject.

But there wasn't a strong sense of community in Fuling, as remarks like Teacher Kong's ill.u.s.trated. Recent history had taught the people to be disengaged from public affairs, and this separation was compounded by a simple lack of awareness. Fuling residents didn't have access to reliable information about important local issues, which, combined with the restrictions on public protest, made it difficult for citizens to be involved in any direct capacity. Most important, they neither expected nor demanded information of this sort.

In my opinion, this disengagement was so complete that it couldn't be blamed simply on post-Liberation patterns. The past fifty years had taught the people not to meddle in public affairs, but to some degree Communism merely built on the foundations of traditional Chinese collectivism, which had shaped social patterns for centuries. This characteristic can be difficult to define, especially with regard to its effects. My students often wrote about how the Chinese were collective-minded, which inspired them to help each other through Socialism, while the individualistic Americans followed the selfish road of Capitalism.

I didn't agree that our countries' political differences were so neatly (and morally) explained by these contrasting att.i.tudes toward the individual and the group. But I felt that the stereotype was more accurate with regard to close social networks of families and friends. The families I knew in Fuling were arguably closer than the average in America, because individual members were less self-centered. They were remarkably generous with each other, and often this selflessness extended to good friends, who were also drawn into tight social circles. Collective thought was particularly good for the elderly, who were much better cared for than in America. In Fuling I never saw older people abandoned in retirement homes; they almost always lived with their children, caring for grandchildren and doing what they could to help out around the family farm, business, or home. There was no question that their lives had more of a sense of purpose and routine than I had seen among the elderly at home.

But such collectivism was limited to small groups, to families and close friends and danwei danwei, or work units, and these tight social circles also acted as boundaries: they were exclusive as well as inclusive, and the average Fuling resident appeared to feel little identification with people outside of his well-known groups. In daily life I saw countless examples of this sort of thought. The most common was the ha.s.sle of ticket lines, which weren't lines so much as piles, great pus.h.i.+ng mobs in which every person fought forward with no concern for anybody else. It was a good example of collective thought, but not in the way my students said. Collectively the mobs had one single idea-that tickets must be purchased-but nothing else held them together, and so each individual made every effort to fulfill his personal goal as quickly as possible.

Another striking example of this brand of collectivism involved the reaction to pickpockets on Fuling's public buses. Once Adam was on a bus from East River and a s.h.i.+fty-looking pa.s.senger stepped off, and the person sitting next to Adam nudged his arm.

"You should be careful," he said. "That was a pickpocket."

"Why didn't you tell me before he got off?" Adam asked, but there was no answer other than a shrug. I saw the same thing happen a number of times, with people gesturing that I should watch my wallet, but never did they confront the thief. When I asked my students about this, they said that everybody knew there were pickpockets who worked the buses, but n.o.body did anything about it. According to my students, the people were afraid to resist, but it seemed there was more to it than that. As long as a pickpocket did not affect you personally, or affect somebody in your family, it was not your business. You might quietly alert the waiguoren waiguoren, because he was a foreign guest, but even here you didn't take any risks. Sometimes it was safest to warn him after the pickpocket had already left the bus.

This same instinct led to the mobs that gathered around accident victims, staring pa.s.sively but doing nothing to help. Crowds often formed in Fuling, but I rarely saw them act as a group motivated by any sort of moral sense. I had witnessed that far more often in individualistic America, where people wanted a community that served the individual, and as a result they sometimes looked at a victim and thought: I can imagine what that feels like, and so I will help. Certainly there is rubbernecking in America as well, but it was nothing compared to what I saw Fuling, where the average citizen seemed to react to a person in trouble by thinking: That is not my brother, or my friend, or anybody I know, and it is interesting to watch him suffer. When there were serious car accidents, people would rush over, shouting eagerly as they ran, "Sile meiyou? Sile meiyou?"-Is anybody dead? Is anybody dead?

In the end, the divide between crowd and mob was extremely fragile in Fuling. Something would happen-an accident, or, more likely, a public argument-and a crowd would appear, gathering its own momentum, swollen by people with one simple reason for being there: something was happening. And occasionally the sheer weight of a ma.s.s of people behind this single idea was indeed enough to make something happen; an argument would escalate, driven by the audience, or somebody from the crowd would start to partic.i.p.ate and spur the action on.

I was both disturbed and fascinated by Fuling crowds, partly because they so often gathered around me. If I stumbled upon an argument or any other public event that had attracted a crowd, I invariably stopped to watch. But usually I watched the faces of the crowd rather than the actors themselves, and in their expressions it was hard to recognize anything other than that single eager observation: something was happening.

FULING IS NOT THE ONLY PLACE IN CHINA where crowds have an edge, and countless writers, both Chinese and foreign, have remarked this tendency. Lu Xun, probably the greatest Chinese literary figure of the twentieth century, wrote with intense feeling and frustration about the pre-Communist tendency of the Chinese to ignore their fellow men in times of need. I recognized this same frustration in the writing of my own students, especially when they created stories about Robin Hood coming to China. Many of their tales featured Robin stealing from corrupt officials, but another common theme involved Robin acting in situations where the crowd was pa.s.sive. One student wrote: where crowds have an edge, and countless writers, both Chinese and foreign, have remarked this tendency. Lu Xun, probably the greatest Chinese literary figure of the twentieth century, wrote with intense feeling and frustration about the pre-Communist tendency of the Chinese to ignore their fellow men in times of need. I recognized this same frustration in the writing of my own students, especially when they created stories about Robin Hood coming to China. Many of their tales featured Robin stealing from corrupt officials, but another common theme involved Robin acting in situations where the crowd was pa.s.sive. One student wrote: One day, haunting the street, he [Robin Hood] espied a pickpocketer reaching for money. At the same time he noticed that people around the woman saw the pickpocketer's deed, but what disappointed him was that no one stood out and prevented the young man. They pretended to see nothing....

I was struck by how many stories described scenes of this sort, and always they continued with Robin coming to the aid of a person who was abandoned by the crowd-a victim of thieves, or somebody publicly beaten by bullies, or a person drowning in a river while the mob watched. To my students, this was the quintessential vision of true heroism, to act while the crowd did nothing, and their holding it up as the ideal suggested that it rarely happened in real life.

I sensed that this was a small part of what contributed to the pa.s.sivity with regard to the Three Gorges Project in Fuling. The vast majority of the people would not be directly affected by the coming changes, and so they weren't concerned. Despite having large sections of the city scheduled to be flooded within the next decade, it wasn't really a community issue, because there wasn't a community as one would generally define it. There were lots of small groups, and there was a great deal of patriotism, but like most patriotism anywhere in the world, this was spurred as much by fear and ignorance as by any true sense of a connection to the Motherland. And you could manipulate this fear and ignorance by telling people that the dam, even though it might destroy the river and the town, was of great importance to China.

The dam was an issue for the people who were unfortunate enough to live along the banks, but even they weren't likely to cause trouble. Like most Chinese, they had been toughened by their history, and this was especially true in a remote place like Fuling. All of the big changes that had ever touched the city came from somewhere else-the Taiping warriors had wandered in from the east, and the Kuomintang had come from Nanjing, and the Communist land reforms had been initiated in the north before working their way south to the river valley. The Third Line Project had come and gone, sweeping everything in its wake. In recent years, fancy new products had started making their way down the Yangtze from Chongqing, along with the legal changes that allowed the new free-market economics. Even waiguoren waiguoren were now starting to appear on the streets of downtown Fuling. You accepted all of these developments and adjusted to them, because they weren't under your control. It was like the Yangtze itself, which came from another place and went somewhere else. Someday in the future it would rise 130 feet, and you would cope with that as well. Once I asked a friend if there would be any problems a.s.sociated with the river's future rise, and, like Teacher Kong, he seemed surprised at the question. "Well," he said at last, "the boats will all float, so they'll be fine." were now starting to appear on the streets of downtown Fuling. You accepted all of these developments and adjusted to them, because they weren't under your control. It was like the Yangtze itself, which came from another place and went somewhere else. Someday in the future it would rise 130 feet, and you would cope with that as well. Once I asked a friend if there would be any problems a.s.sociated with the river's future rise, and, like Teacher Kong, he seemed surprised at the question. "Well," he said at last, "the boats will all float, so they'll be fine."

There was also a sense that the dam was simply a good idea. It meant electricity, which represented progress, and this was the most important issue for the vast majority of Fuling's residents. The completed dam would supposedly create enough electricity to replace the burning of fifty million tons of coal a year, which was no small benefit in a horribly polluted country where one of every four deaths was attributed to lung disease. There were days when I stood on my balcony and felt a touch of sadness as I looked at the Yangtze, because I knew its days as a rus.h.i.+ng river were numbered. But there were many other days when the smog was so thick that I couldn't see the river at all.

I also gained new perspective on this issue during the winter, when there were periodic power cuts to conserve electricity. My apartment had only electric heating, and sometimes these blackouts lasted for hours-long, cold hours, the dark apartment growing steadily more uncomfortable until my breath was white in the candlelight. I found that during these periods I didn't think too much about whether Fuling's new dike would hold, or if the immigrants would be well taken care of, or whether the White Crane Ridge would be adequately protected. What I thought about was getting warm. Cold was like hunger; it had a way of simplifying everything.

And a lot of people in China still think in these terms. It's different from America, where there is an average of three thousand watts of electrical power for every citizen-enough for every single American to turn on an oven and a hair dryer at once. In China, there are 150 watts per head, which is enough for everybody to switch on a light bulb or two. But even one light isn't possible for the sixty million Chinese who have no electricity at all.

The history of such projects in China has two different aspects. The country has been controlling and harnessing water for centuries-no other civilization on earth has such a long and successful history of turning rivers to man's use. The development of central Sichuan province was originally sparked by the construction of Dujiangyan, a brilliantly designed irrigation project that was constructed twenty-three centuries ago and even today still functions perfectly, turning the Chengdu Basin into one of the most fertile rice-growing regions in the country. Even the Yangtze has been tamed before, albeit on a much smaller scale; the Gezhou Dam was completed in 1981 on a site downstream from the location of the current project.

But there is also the history of Henan province, where heavy rains in 1975 caused sixty-two modern dams to fall like dominoes, one after another, and 230,000 people died. Although the scale of that particular disaster was unique, the poor engineering was less unusual: 3,200 Chinese dams have burst since 1949. In this century, the failure rate of Chinese dams is 3.7 percent, compared to 0.6 percent in the rest of the world.

In the end I was like most people in Fuling-I pa.s.sively watched the preparations for the project, and I tried not to be too judgmental. I was, after all, an outsider. But I figured it was better to be there before the dam than afterward, and it was good to see the White Crane Ridge and the Three Gorges before the river was tamed. There was man's history and there was the Yangtze's, and I didn't particularly want to be there when they clashed, changing the place forever.

THE SEMESTER FINISHED near the end of January, and we had four weeks off for the Spring Festival Holiday. Adam and I could go anywhere we wished-other volunteers were going to j.a.pan, Thailand, Laos-but for us it was easiest to go downstream, which was where we went. near the end of January, and we had four weeks off for the Spring Festival Holiday. Adam and I could go anywhere we wished-other volunteers were going to j.a.pan, Thailand, Laos-but for us it was easiest to go downstream, which was where we went.

We bought tickets on the afternoon Jiangyu boat because we had been told not to. Our colleagues had warned us against those s.h.i.+ps; they were dirty and crowded and served primarily as transportation for people who lived along the river. They didn't stop at the temples and interesting sights, like the tourist s.h.i.+ps, and there wouldn't be other waiguoren waiguoren. All of that sounded good-I had already seen enough temples, and the cliffs of the Gorges would look the same from any boat. Mostly I was interested in catching a glimpse of average life on the river.

Previously the Jiangyu line had been called "The East is Red," in honor of the song praising Mao Zedong, but now there was a great deal of compet.i.tion on the Yangtze and it was better not to remind potential customers of the sort of service they had received in the past. The boat we took was named the Monkey King Monkey King, taken from a character in the cla.s.sic Journey to the West Journey to the West, which describes a seventh-century pilgrimage to India. That had been during the Tang Dynasty, and the people along the Yangtze had no bad memories a.s.sociated with travel in those days.

Our boat swung away from the docks on a beautiful afternoon, the sun s.h.i.+ning bright on the White Crane Ridge. The Monkey King Monkey King was everything we had hoped for-pleasantly grimy, bustling with pa.s.sengers, and there were no was everything we had hoped for-pleasantly grimy, bustling with pa.s.sengers, and there were no waiguoren waiguoren besides the four of us who were traveling together. In addition to Adam, there was another Peace Corps volunteer, Craig Simons, and a boyhood friend of mine named Mike Graham, who was teaching English and studying Chinese in Xi'an. We settled on the back deck, standing in the suns.h.i.+ne and watching the river scenery. besides the four of us who were traveling together. In addition to Adam, there was another Peace Corps volunteer, Craig Simons, and a boyhood friend of mine named Mike Graham, who was teaching English and studying Chinese in Xi'an. We settled on the back deck, standing in the suns.h.i.+ne and watching the river scenery.

The old familiar landscape slipped behind-White Flat Mountain disappeared behind a bend, and Raise the Flag Mountain faded into the distance. Strange new hills rolled eastward along the Yangtze. To me they were nameless, without history, and every time we pa.s.sed a paG.o.da-topped mountain or a riverside hamlet I wondered what had happened there. Had s.h.i.+ Dakai and his army pa.s.sed through? Were there any echoes of the lost dynasties, any carved stones or ancient tombs? Had a sad-eyed calligrapher with a steady hand ever been exiled to those sh.o.r.es? I was accustomed to being the one standing still; so often I had sat on my balcony, gazing down on the s.h.i.+ps and wondering where they were going; but now I was looking at the land and thinking about what might have happened there. I realized that this was how most pa.s.sing tourists saw Fuling: a dirty harbor, a long sloping mountain, a wandering thought-did anything ever happen here?-and then the river town was gone and new scenery came into view.

The sun glanced off the silver-brown water; hawks glided overhead. Men rode unsteady bamboo rafts along the river's edge. Coal boats puttered past. Workers quarried limestone along the sh.o.r.e, the clink of their chisels echoing clear above the winter river. We docked briefly at Fengdu, a long narrow city stretched across the river flats. Fengdu was low, too low; in a decade all of it would be flooded. There was a paG.o.da on a hill just beyond town and that was where the sun set, glowing orange for a moment and then disappearing below the green slope.

A worker with a cigarette clenched between his teeth took down the Chinese flag and put it in a box on the stern. Mike chatted with a former biology student from Beijing, who explained that in 1989 he had taken part in the student demonstrations; the subsequent crackdown had prevented him from pursuing an academic career. Instead he went into business with some friends, producing fire alarms for boats, and this journey was both a business trip and a victory tour. "Every boat on the Yangtze has our alarms," he said proudly. There were still dissidents in prison for the political crimes of 1989, but there was also a whole generation of young Chinese like this man, whose political record had pushed him to the relative freedom of business.

The hills were rising now, blue-green with the coming darkness, and often they were too steep for farming. On the north bank we pa.s.sed a long wild hillside, empty except for two small white graves pressed close together. They were completely alone and the fengshui fengshui was good; they faced south, overlooking the river, and perhaps they were high enough to foil the coming reservoir. was good; they faced south, overlooking the river, and perhaps they were high enough to foil the coming reservoir.

The boat cut its motor, coasting with the current. The air was still. Except for us the river was empty; almost n.o.body was on deck. Everything was quiet as the heart of the Yangtze swept us onward. And in that moment I felt the power of the river, its ma.s.sive silent strength pus.h.i.+ng us downstream as night crept over the valley.

The two lonely tombs slipped past in the twilight. The hills loomed black against the sky. Stars began to appear, faint and cold in the distance. And then the motor rumbled to life once more, and darkness came, and I went to my bunk in our third-cla.s.s cabin.

There were ten beds and eleven people in our cabin; a young man and a woman were sharing the bunk below Adam. On Chinese boats and trains it was common for pa.s.sengers to do that, because couples rarely paid for two separate bunks, and often friends did the same to save money. n.o.body would look twice at two men lying together on a cramped berth.