CHINA: War on the Yellow River

China’s mighty Yellow River has always been a cruel and capricious neighbor to the 140 million people—a fourth of China’s populace—who live near its banks. In the past 3,000 years it has flooded more than 1,500 times, often inundating whole counties and killing hundreds of thousands of people. It greedily eats up millions of tons of precious Chinese earth each year, and contributes to droughts by draining the eroded earth. Though Chinese peasants have dreamed longingly of a day when its muddy waters would run crystal-clear to the sea, the “River of Sorrow” has defied every attempt to conquer it.

Last week the peasants were being asked to believe a startling promise. By the fall of 1961, says Vice Premier Teng Tzu-hui, the lower reaches of the world’s siltiest river will indeed run crystal-clear. Red China has decided to take on the proud and tempestuous Yellow.

The Plan of Battle. With the help of Russian technicians, the Red Chinese have drawn up an ambitious plan to straddle the Yellow and its tributaries with a vast network of dams. The first phase will take 15 years and cost $1.8 billion; the entire scheme will not be completed for at least half a century. Key project of the first-phase plan, scheduled to be started next year: a mammoth, TVA-like dam and reservoir at Sanmen Gorge in Honan Province, where the turbulent Yellow is compressed between two steep cliffs. The plans are not much different from those conceived by Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists in the old days, but these projects are considered more plausible because of the Communists’ ruthless ability to mobilize whole armies of forced labor.

To make way for the rising waters of the Sanmen Reservoir, more than 600,000 people will be moved from their homes and resettled elsewhere. The Sanmen Reservoir will be one of the world’s largest. The dam will protect the area from floods, create enough electric power for the industrial needs of three provinces, and help clear the Yellow’s muddy waters downstream.

Twenty-eight smaller dams have already been built on the Yellow and its tributaries, and 31 others are in progress. The Reds also plan to attack the Yellow with two other mammoth reservoirs at Liukia Gorge in Kansu Province and Lungyang Gorge in Tsinghai Province. They are due to be completed in 1967.

The Spoils of Battle. The overall plan calls for converting the river into a sort of staircase by building 46 dams along its middle and lower reaches, controlling its tributaries with 24 large reservoirs. The battle to subdue the Yellow will be long and fierce, but the spoils of battle are worth the effort, even though the peasants, who know the Yellow best, are convinced it will be tamed only “when the sun rises in the West.”

Other ambitious Red Chinese plans afoot:

¶ Joint development with the Soviet Union of the Amur River Basin, which forms the boundary between the two countries. The two nations ‘signed an agreement last month. China’s share of Amur hydroelectric power will be more than her total electricity production last year.

¶ Doubling the quota of new rail lines to be finished by 1958 to 4,700 miles. Four new rail lines have been opened in the last year, one of them linking Peking with Ulan Bator, the capital of Outer Mongolia, and Soviet Siberia. Another is designed to link Northwest China and Soviet Central Asia, but this will take two or three more five-year plans to finish. Though the Communists talk grandly of their railroad building, their actual yearly mileage is not sensationally higher than that of the Nationalists during the years 1928-41, a period of depression, civil war and invasion. ¶ Possible restoration of China’s fabled, 2,500-year-old Grand Canal, which once provided an inland waterway 1,000 miles, from Tientsin to Hangchow, and linked the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers.

These are all part of the ambitious remaking of China, which the Communists say they need peace to achieve.