China’s latest massive dam project could be a weapon in disguise

On Dec. 25, Beijing announced it would build a dam on Tibet’s longest river, which Beijing calls the Yarlung Zangbo.

The project, which will generate an estimated 300 billion kilowatt hours of electricity each year, will have almost three times more installed capacity than what is now the world’s largest hydroelectric project, China’s Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River.

The announced cost is $137 billion. The Economist calls the new dam “the world’s most expensive infrastructure project.” And perhaps it is the world’s most controversial one as well.

“The project is dangerous in a wide variety of ways, including the proven risk of triggering seismic activity that could affect the integrity of the structure itself,” Cleo Paskal, senior fellow of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told me. “So why does Beijing want the expensive and unstable project so badly? One reason is that it is a weapon as much as it is a hydro project.”

India, Paskal notes, is worried that China, by releasing waters, can create floods. "Bangladesh will also be affected,” she states, “and unrest in Bangladesh has a way of spilling over into India.”

Downstream countries have reason to be concerned. The dam will be built close to China’s border with India. The Yarlung Zangbo, known outside China as the Yarlung Tsangpo, becomes the Brahmaputra when it flows into India’s Arunachal Pradesh. The river eventually enters Bangladesh before emptying into the Bay of Bengal.

India on Friday conveyed concerns to Beijing. A day later, the Chinese government replied. “China’s hydropower development in the lower reaches of the Yarlung Zangbo River aims to speed up developing clean energy, and respond to climate change and extreme hydrological disasters,” posted Yu Jing, spokesperson at China’s embassy in New Delhi. The hydropower development there has been studied in an in-depth way for decades, and safeguard measures have been taken for the security of the project and ecological environment protection.”

Yu then added this: “The project has no negative impact on the lower reaches.”

No impact? That, of course, is impossible with a project of this size.

Yu made another impossible-to-believe statement: “China has always been responsible for the development of cross-border rivers.” In fact, China has rarely been responsible when it comes to dams it has built on the high plains of Tibet.

A senior U.S. official told the Times of India “We’ve certainly seen in many places in the Indo-Pacific that upstream dams that the Chinese have created, including in the Mekong region, can have really potentially damaging environmental but also climate impacts on downstream countries.” That statement was made ahead of National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan’s visit to New Delhi on Sunday, where he discussed the new dam.

India and other downstream countries have for decades been complaining about Beijing’s excessively selfish water policies.

Yet what can the world do but complain? India, according to Mohan Katarki, an Indian expert on water disputes, can build a dam of its own to contain the “flash floods” that China can create and to even out the flow of water in general. Neither China nor India is a party to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Non-Navigational Uses of International Water Courses, but customary rules of international law still apply, such as the equitable utilization doctrine, Katarki points out.

“China is under a threshold obligation to conduct a transboundary environment impact assessment before beginning negotiations,” he wrote, but “compulsory adjudication is still alien to international law.”

In short, India will be able to stop the dam only if it can obtain leverage over China.

“India does not have too many good options to counter China’s move to build the Yarlung Tsangpo dam,” Kamran Bokari, senior director of Eurasian Security and Prosperity of the New Lines Institute, tells me. “New Delhi is already expending a great deal of resources to counter Chinese military pressure on their shared Himalayan frontier. New Delhi also cannot pull back on the bilateral trade relationship without undermining its efforts to emerge as a rising global geoeconomic player. In essence, the Indians, in the current moment, lack the leverage that can help them shape Chinese behavior on this issue.”

The key words are “in the current moment.” As Bokari said, “The scale of this project being so massive means this dam will take a while to build, which does buy India some time to craft a strategy.”

And China is getting weaker with time. Its economy is deteriorating quickly, as seen in the fall of its currency against the dollar and the plunge in government bond yields, among other things. China will still be able to marshal resources for big projects, but as the Chinese economy contracts and as Xi Jinping’s ambitions expand, China’s finances will be stretched.

China can announce grand projects like the Yarlung Tsangpo dam, but I doubt it will be able to complete all of them.

In the meantime, China, by announcing the dam project, is further poisoning relations with India.

“Over a decade ago, an Indian strategist said of a similar plan, ‘China will spend $100 billion building it, and we will spend $10 million blowing it up,’” Paskal told me. “I don’t know if he meant it literally, but you can be sure the Indian strategic community will defend their national interests.”

It looks like China, with the Yarlung Tsangpo dam, just picked on the wrong downstream country.

Gordon G. Chang is the author of “Plan Red: China’s Project to Destroy America” and “The Coming Collapse of China.”

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