Exploration Pack 2: The environment
The documentary from this exploration pack kind of opened up my eyes a little bit on alternate lives in China that I was not aware of. As previously whenever I had been shown people’s lives in China it has always been those living in the major cities or those who work in factory communities and these communities were being shown through American news outlets, so this rural Chinese life was something I was very unaware of. Looking through these peoples’ lives was a little sobering to say the least, not only because of the contextualization of my own privilege of my living conditions but also the privilege I have of my education and access to information. The manipulation and exploitation of the people is based around the lack of information at their fingertips, a lack of educational resources, and the Dam companies’ ability to limit the information they receive.
The focus of the documentary, while it did cover the environmental movement stemming from the Great Leap Forward and the disastrous effects it had, mainly focused around the building of one dam the Tiger Leaping Gorge dam on the Yangtze River in Southern China. The filmmakers particularly focused on the people of the region in order to humanize their effort to resist the dam, educating the people by bringing them to another village that had their way of life decimated by a dam or by showing them a previous movie made about the effects of dams on the people living near them. This education of the villagers created a shockwave of anger and passion against the building of the dam, they would not stand for it as it would destroy their lives. These people had been fed lies that the dam would make them rich for years and it all boiled over resulting in them wanting to make a stand for their way of life. Through protests and kidnapping that was resolved the village people were able to get the damn stopped by the government, as it was being built by private contractors, but this was all the way back in 2006-2007, what is happening now?
The outlook is not great, the most recent article covering the situation that I could find is from around 7 months ago and is from an American news source. They detail how the environmental movement has slowly been eroded and died out as a result of the central government cracking gown on NGOs (non-government organizations), resulting in the dam developers to gain support for their projects. Sadly a dam at Tiger Leaping Gorge was approved in 2019, i believe they are still in the planning phase as I could not find and construction pictures of the dam, but one is planned to be built on the river. A larger question still needs to be posed that is larger than the dams, what will happen to China’s environment with the crackdown on activists, will catastrophes on the scale of The Great Leap Forward occur or will the government have some foresight?
Bibliography:
Marcuse, Gary and Betsy Carson. Waking the Green Tiger. Face to Face Media, 2011.
Standaert, M. (2020, October 5). With activists SILENCED, China moves ahead on big Dam project. https://e360.yale.edu/features/with-activists-silenced-china-moves-ahead-on-big-dam-project.
