It's not nice to fool mother nature

Props to Peter Bosshard for the best blog post title of the week: Mao, Tao and the Three Gorges Dam.  He provides a lot of good links on the recent Chinese government acknowledgement of serious problems with the mega hydro project.  David Bandurski, over at the China Media Project, is also on this story, with links to Chinese language sources, one of which provides this front page picture of Huang Wanli, who opposed the idea of the dam way back in 1957 (he lost the argument...):

I have to take exception, however, to this point made by Bosshard:

A few hundred miles from the Three Gorges reservoir, the water works of Dujiangyan have irrigated the fertile Sichuan plains and prevented floods through an ingenious system of levees for more than 2000 years. They reflect the Taoist philosophy of working with the forces of nature, while the Yangtze dam symbolizes the Maoist (and Confucian) approach of subduing the natural world.

While it is true that Dujiangyan has proven to be environmentally friendly and, obviously, sustainable, it is not quite accurate to ascribe this to Taoist philosophy.  After all, Dujiangyan was built by Qin, the prototypical Legalist state.  Qin was very much about subduing nature and man and anything else that stood in the way of its political domination.  That Dujiangyan has worked with the forces of nature is a reflection of what was technologically possible for Qin at the time.  In many ways, the Three Gorges Project, with its authoritarian history and culture, is more of a Legalist project than Confucian.  Indeed, Confucians would be concerned about both the environmental imbalances of the project (remember: the Master fished with a line but not nets, to avoid overfishing, and he never shot roosting birds - Analects 7.27) and the disruption that all of the forced evictions brought to families....

Taoists might be even more skeptical than Bosshard suggests.  Why build big dams in the first place?

Longing to take hold of all beneath heaven and improve it... I've seen such dreams invariably fail.  All beneath heaven is a sacred vessel, something beyond all improvement.  Try to improve it and you ruin it.  Try to hold it and you lose it...   DDJ 29

In other words, it's not nice to fool mother nature:

Comments

[Carl]

I think the Zhuangzi way to approach it would be to say if the water's where you already want it, you don't need to hold it back. Build a big enough dam, and you can't tell the dam from the mountains.

[Peter Bosshard]

Many thanks for pointing out my error. For the record, the Dujiangyan water works don't depend on a dam, but I'll add your interesting clarification to my blog post anyway.