1999 article
Corruption brings fear for safety of China's Three Gorges dam
China's biggest and most controversial dam project, the Three Gorges on the Yangzi River, has become the latest focus of a wave of allegations about corrupt officials taking bribes from unqualified contractors - allegations that are raising fears about the safety of the project.
Nearly 100 cases of 'corruption, bribery and embezzlement' related to the project were discovered last year, Beijing revealed yesterday. The 15-year-long programme to build the dam, said the China Daily, was a rare opportunity for the construction business. But it had also become 'a challenge of similar scale for the (public) prosecutors.'
Critics of the huge dam, which will raise the water level in the Three Gorges by 210ft, have warned that any construction defect could have fatal consequences.
Renewed fears about the dam were sparked by the collapse two weeks ago of a bridge upstream from the Three Gorges at Qijiang, on a Yangzi tributary, as a result of suspected faulty construction by a contractor who bribed local officials.
Diagrams in the popular press show how the misalignment of steel pipes and plates in the bridge's suspension system created dangerous fault lines. Local residents claim they knew the bridge was weak, but warning signs were ignored.
A local official has been arrested after allegedly taking a bribe of more than 100,000 renminbi (£7,000) from an unqualified contractor who built the bridge.
Yesterday's report of corruption in the Three Gorges stressed that only 16 out of the 95 cases were related to the actual construction of the dam. Most cases involved officials embezzling funds intended for the resettlement of residents displaced as the dam raises the river's level for 200 miles upstream.
Over a million people will have to move to new towns and villages before their homes are flooded by the A17 billion project, which is aimed partly at providing clean electrical power, replacing old coal-based sources.
The prime minister, Zhu Rongji, sounded a warning note last month - before the bridge disaster - when he visited the dam site, delivering a message that "quality is vital to the project".
Promises of "quality control" by the dam's builders have now appeared next to pictures of grieving Qijiang relatives with portraits of their loved ones and a petition demanding justice.
The bridge collapse comes only months after the failure of dykes on the Yangzi, and rivers in north-east China, during the summer floods. Negligence by local officials was also blamed for these collapses.
Now dubious projects are being investigated up and down the country, with the suggestion that a repeat of the Qijiang disaster could happen anywhere.
Shoddy public works are frightening people near the Yangzi river's Three Gorges dam
John Gittings in Beijing
and 2014 article
Chinese criticise state firm behind Three Gorges dam over graft probe
By Li Hui and
Ben Blanchard
BEIJING Fri Feb 28, 2014 7:41am GMT
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1 of 2. The Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River in Yichang, Hubei province is seen in this aerial view taken December 2, 2009.
Credit: Reuters/Stringer
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(Reuters) - A scathing report on corruption at the company that built
China's $59-billion Three Gorges dam, the world's biggest hydropower scheme, has reignited public anger over a project funded through a special levy paid by all citizens.
The report by the ruling Communist Party's anti-graft watchdog last week found that some officials at the Three Gorges Corporation, set up in 1993 to run the scheme, were guilty of nepotism, shady property deals and dodgy bidding procedures.
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Between 1992 and 2009, all citizens had to pay a levy built into power prices across
China to channel money to the dam's
construction, a project overshadowed by compulsory relocations of residents and environmental concerns.
"The relatives and friends of some leaders interfered with
construction projects, certain bidding was conducted secretly ... and some leaders illicitly occupied multiple apartments," the graft watchdog said on its website(
中央纪委监察部网站
The Three Gorges Corporation published a statement on its website on Tuesday saying it would look into the issues the probe raised, and strictly punish any corrupt conduct and violations of the law and party discipline.
The accusations - made as part of President Xi Jinping's crackdown on deep-rooted corruption - have spread rapidly across China's popular Twitter-like service Sina Weibo, and some of China's more outspoken newspapers have weighed in too.
Time-Weekly, a newspaper based in southern China's Guangzhou city, this week revealed further details of the graft.
In one case, the newspaper reported, a company bidding for a construction project related to the dam area was told to pay a bribe of one million
yuan ($163,200) by members of the hydropower giant's bidding evaluation panel.
"Because of its fully state-owned background ... it was given special 'protection', and for years was practically free of supervision and regulations," the newspaper wrote.
The Southern Metropolitan Daily called in an editorial for the full weight of the law to be applied to a firm that has sucked up so many national resources.
"The entire strength of
China converged on building this one massive project," it wrote. "Enormous sums went into it, great powers were bestowed. But the oversight over these powers which should have been there, was not."
On Weibo, the topic ranks among the most widely discussed subjects.
"Did the Three Gorges fund paid by us all on every electricity bill actually go to feed dogs?" wrote one user.
"Why did the Three Gorges Corporation, fed and nurtured by us all, become an 'unifilal son'?" asked another user.
This is not the first time the company - and the project - have come in for criticism.
Late last year, soon after the party sent its graft inspection team into the Three Gorges Corporation, a senior official involved in "follow-up" work on the dam was fired for "suspected serious disciplinary violations", the usual euphemism for corruption.
In 2011, then-premier Wen Jiabao presided over a government meeting on the dam which said that though the scheme did provide benefits, it had created a myriad of urgent problems, from the relocation of more than a million residents to risks of geological disasters.
And back in 2000, six years before the project was complete, authorities busted a ring of officials who siphoned off hundreds of millions of
yuan in resettlement funds.
(Editing by Clarence Fernandez)
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