WATER POLITICS

By embarking on building a super-dam, the largest ever conceived, in the seismically active Sino-Indian border region, China is potentially creating a ticking water bomb for millions of people living downstream in India and Bangladesh.

The super-dam on the Yarlung Tsangpo river, better known as the Brahmaputra, is located in the eastern Himalayas, which sit on a geological fault line where the Indian Plate and the Eurasian Plate collide.

In a fresh reminder of the dangers posed by the megaproject, a strong earthquake this month in the eastern Himalayas, near Tibet’s borders with Nepal and India, damaged five dams, forcing the evacuation of people from downstream villages. The magnitude 6.8 quake killed at least 134 people, wounded hundreds and wrecked buildings, including Tibetan Buddhist monasteries and nunneries, some centuries old.

The concern that the behemoth dam will be the world’s riskiest project is reinforced by another fact: Two years after the Zipingpu Dam came into service near a seismic fault, a massive earthquake on the Tibetan Plateau’s eastern rim killed 87,000 people in 2008. The quake drew international attention to what scientists call reservoir-triggered seismicity (RTS), when the weight of the water impounded in a large dam reservoir causes severe tectonic stresses, triggering earthquakes usually within a few years of the dam being commissioned.

The reservoir of China’s Three Gorges Dam, currently the world’s biggest, is longer than the largest of North America’s Great Lakes, with its construction submerging two cities, 114 towns and 1,680 villages, and displacing 1.4 million residents in the largest peacetime evacuation in history. Beijing has not disclosed how many Tibetans will be displaced by the super-dam, which will generate more than three times as much electricity as the Three Gorges Dam in central China.

As its 11 giant dams on the Mekong River illustrate, Beijing takes a highly secretive approach to its dam projects on international rivers flowing to other countries from the water-rich Tibetan Plateau, whose annexation in the early 1950s helped turn China into an unrivaled hydro-hegemon, with 18 downstream neighbors. Tibet is the source of Asia’s greatest river systems.

China has provided no public updates on the super-dam after its rubber-stamp National People’s Congress in March 2021 approved the project’s construction next to the heavily militarized frontier with India. But shortly after the approval, Beijing formally included the super-dam in its latest five-year development plan and opened a new railroad and highway to transport heavy equipment, materials and workers to the remote project site. All this suggested the start of construction.

Yet, a few weeks ago, China’s state-run Xinhua News Agency ran a story as if the super-dam project had just been approved. Xinhua reported nothing about the project’s construction status, other than to quote an official statement to claim the gargantuan dam was part of the country’s effort to pursue “high-quality development.” Subsequently, China’s foreign ministry and its charge d’affaires in New Delhi separately contended that the project would not negatively affect downstream India or Bangladesh — but again without disclosing any information about the super-dam’s current status.

The Brahmaputra, the world’s highest-altitude river, curves sharply around the Himalayas, forming the world’s longest and steepest canyon — twice as deep as America’s Grand Canyon — and holds Asia’s largest untapped water resources. By building the super-dam there, China is seeking to harness the power of a 2,800-meter drop just before the river crosses into India.

The project is not only compounding China’s already-fraught relationship with India but also threatening to affect rainfall patterns in Asia by wreaking severe ecological damage in Tibet, one of the world’s most biodiverse regions. Tibet’s fragile ecosystems play a central role in triggering Asia’s monsoonal rains.

The super-dam will also defile what is sacred territory for Tibetans: The canyon region’s major mountains, cliffs and caves represent the body of their guardian deity, the goddess Dorje Phagmo, and the Brahmaputra represents her spine. Tibetan culture, with its deeply rooted reverence for nature, acted as an environmental guardian until China avariciously began exploiting Tibet’s vast mineral and water resources.

China’s dam frenzy has already inflicted ecological damage at home and in downstream countries. China’s over-damming of internal rivers has harmed ecosystems, with many rivers disappearing and some drying up, including the Yellow River, the cradle of Chinese civilization. And with its dam builders turning their attention to international rivers flowing out of the Tibetan Plateau, adverse ecological impacts are becoming apparent, for example, in the lower Mekong Basin, including recurrent droughts and saltwater intrusion into the delta.

Today, Tibet’s glaciers and other ecosystems are threatened by climate and environmental change, and if China’s environmentally devastating activities accelerate glacial attrition on the Tibetan Plateau, the resulting significant changes in river flows would not spare even mainland China.

Yet, an undaunted China is pressing ahead with the controversial super-dam, whose construction is tantamount to waging a stealthy water war against India. But, in the long run, the country that could suffer the most is densely populated and China-friendly Bangladesh, located farthest downstream.

Once ready, the super-dam would raise the haunting specter of a quake-triggered collapse. There have been hundreds of dam breaches and collapses in China over the years, including the world’s deadliest dam failures: The 1975 typhoon-triggered collapses of the giant Banqiao and Shimantan dams in central China unleashed a cascade effect that wrecked 62 smaller dams, killing more than 85,000 people and displacing 11 million.

More recently, record flooding endangered even the Three Gorges Dam in 2020, putting some 400 million Chinese at risk.

If a powerful earthquake centered in the canyon region caused the super-dam to collapse, millions downstream could die, largely in the Brahmaputra Valley of India’s Assam state, where the river’s immense width makes it look like an ocean in the monsoon season.

Yet there is little prospect of China halting work on the super-dam. As long as the Chinese Communist Party remains in power, it will ignore the environmental and humanitarian consequences of its actions.