Bill Belew has raised 2 bi-cultural kids, now 34 and 30. And he and his wife are now parenting a 3rd, Mia, who is 8.
China
China is almost finished with the Three Gorges Dam, it’s biggest construction project since the Great Wall. The Dam, btw, is visible from every satellite in space.
The dam is a mile and half long and creates a reservoir 370 miles up the Yangtze River.
China says the $28 billion dam will help reduce the frequency of killer floods in the lower Yangtze region. In the process, however, it will displace more than 1.2 million people from about 1,200 villages. At least they knew it was coming.
A little more than 1/10th of those displaced were sent packing a long distance with no sufficient payback.
The dam is 606 feet high….and took 15 years to build.
It will produce 85 billion kilowatt-hours a year = to the output of 18 coal or nuclear power plants.
Additionally, it has a flood storage capacity the size of Oregon’s Crater Lake.
Perhaps more than anything, China wants to say, “Look what we can do!”
Yep…look what they can do. And then?
What do you think?
>$28 billion dam
There are lots of Japanese Yen injected into that, as a part of ODA. I wish they used it more to else where, where more funding is really needed.
That’s interesting. I didn’t know of the Japanese investment into the dam.
Thanks for passing on the information.
I don’t have any figures or evidences on my hand as such. But what I heard is that Japan has paid China large sum of compensation for WW2, in a form of ODA. Some of this was of supposed to pay for, e.g. relatives of victims of masaccars, sorting out the leftovers of poisnous gas bombs, etc. I am sure the chinese govenment has yet to admit, but many says much were injected into other “projects” like the dam.
Toru,
That is really interesting…
And the Chinese government continues to cry foul whenever a PM visits Yasukuni.