Putting ‘rupture’ to work at the Three Gorges Dam

Abstract

This provocative article by Sango Mahanty and co-authors proposes rupture as a temporally and spatially expansive view of change and one that encompasses intersections with other crises. In our commentary, we put rupture to work as an analytic, thinking through the dynamics of China's massive Three Gorges Dam as a rupture episode with far-reaching disruption to everyday lives and hydrological and socio-economic systems. Through our consideration of the complex temporalities, spatial and material relationships, and generative sociopolitical potential of the Three Gorges Dam, we see value in the authors’ expansive view of change that looks well beyond the boundaries of ‘the project’. Practically speaking; however, we see the need to put some boundaries around our analysis, or the scope of rupture is potentially endless.

This provocative article by Mahanty et al. (2023) proposes rupture as a temporally and spatially expansive view of change and one that encompasses intersections with other crises. In what follows we put rupture to work as an analytic, thinking through the dynamics of China's massive Three Gorges Dam as a rupture episode with far-reaching disruption to everyday lives and hydrological and socio-economic systems. We draw on our long engagement with the consequences of the Chinese state's Three Gorges Dam. Some very brief context: all major rivers bar one in China are dammed extensively, with both small and large dams; China has a central role in dam-building globally; and it has also embarked on equally disruptive interbasin water transfers such as the South-North Water Transfer Project (see Rogers et al., 2020). We address each of the article's themes in turn: complex temporalities, spatial and material relations, and generative socio-political potential, offering some final thoughts and questions to conclude.

Complex temporalities

The authors argue that rupture involves diverse temporalities that are not smooth or linear. Similar to the sites discussed in the Mekong Basin, the Three Gorges Dam has materialised from complex processes of change that stretch well beyond the official beginning and end of ‘the Project’. Land transformations reached their zenith during processes of compensation, resettlement, demolition, and reconstruction for the Dam. However, the precise nature of these can only be understood with reference to a longer history of land reallocations following the Communist Revolution, collectivisation, decollectivisation, and the return to household management in the 1980s. Understanding the interrelationships between political change and intersecting crises is hard, complex, and necessary work: we agree that it is absent in much of the mainstream research on dams and resettlement (Rogers and Wilmsen, 2020). It requires deep engagement with a place and its politics, and critically, it necessitates fieldwork and the co-production of research findings with local experts.

We are drawn to particular places at specific moments in time through the construction of large dams. What the rupture analytic asks us to do is to look deeply into the histories that make dams placeable and people and non-humans displaceable. It also asks us to question our entry and exit points for understanding socio-ecological transformation associated with large dams (or other rupture episodes) and their interrelationship with other processes and crises. When do we know enough to be confident in our understanding of nature-society transformations in a particular place? Post-construction at the Three Gorges we see ongoing negotiations over land access, further out-migration for labour, and attempts (not always successful, but forms of slow violence nonetheless) to encourage more capitalist forms of agriculture through agribusinesses, large-scale farms, and farmer cooperatives. These are intimately linked to the broader transformation of the Chinese economy and to other nation-building development projects and environmental interventions in this region. It is hard to conclude whether the Dam as rupture amplified or intensified ongoing transformations – sometimes these processes are peripherally related to the Dam, sometimes centrally. This is a very difficult question to answer empirically. The politics of land and compensation have certainly been extensively discussed (McDonald, 2006) as have the after-effects of the Dam as property relations in rural China continue to be renegotiated (Rogers et al., 2021; Wilmsen, 2016; Wilmsen et al., 2023), but the questions arise for us – where is the starting point in identifying and examining interactivity, where is the end point, and should we be making distinctions between interrelated processes that are central versus peripheral?

Spatial and material relationships

In thinking through the spatial and material relations of rupture, the authors highlight how our analytical choices around scale make some processes visible and others invisible. Local scales of analysis are central to understanding impacts on people's livelihoods and have been the core of work on the Three Gorges Dam. But, as with the re-scaling of dam infrastructure in Thailand and Laos, the Three Gorges Dam highlights a critical scale of analysis that is essential for understanding hydropower construction worldwide. We cannot ignore how the Three Gorges Dam and other big dam projects such as Gezhouba catalysed a Chinese hydropower industry or ‘Chinese water machine’ (Han and Webber, 2020) that now dominates dam building around the world, including many of the dams listed in this study (Huaneng at Lower Sesan 2, Sinohydro at Areng, and Datang at Arai). These processes extend spatially to encompass national-level policy-making, bargaining with local governments, external capital flows, supply chains that reach to the Middle East, and migration flows that reach to Africa. This assemblage comes into view only when moving from individual dams and their flows of capital and expertise, to the national context of Chinese companies ‘going out’ and on to dam projects in other parts of the world. We agree that there are multiple potential scales of analysis for rupture, but also emphasise that working across scales is essential.

Multiplicity in the lived experience of rupture is something that has been well parsed at the Three Gorges Dam. Byrnes (2018), for instance, has carefully analysed Jia Zhangke's Still Life and its themes of demolition, memory, and nostalgia. Byrnes’ book also reminds us of how deeply enmeshed the Three Gorges Dam is in cultural representations of the Three Gorges region extending back to the Tang Dynasty. This is a landscape that has been inscribed and reinscribed over centuries and by successive political states: which again begs the question, beyond saying that multiplicity encompasses historical agents, where does rupture begin? Similarly, in terms of the more-than-human implications of the Three Gorges Dam, there are clearly extensive impacts on fish migration, water quality, and river flow (see for instance Wang et al., 2016), habitat and micro-climates in the tributaries, cropping systems (see Rogers et al., 2022) and potentially the geological processes of the region. Properly understanding these implications requires an interdisciplinarity that is not very evident in existing scholarship.

Generative socio-political potential

The authors argue that rupture can be an ‘open moment’ where existing power relations are exposed and there is potential for institutions and political positions to be reworked. At the Three Gorges, there was not just a reassertion of existing power relations, but an intensification of state power in a region that had long braced for the construction of the Dam. The Three Gorges is not a frontier or border area, but it is marginal in other senses. Thus the Dam's construction made the Party-state more visible and felt more intensely in people's everyday lives. International and domestic civil society campaigns against the Dam were launched but largely silenced (Wilmsen and Webber, 2016). Ultimately, the Three Gorges Dam has become a symbol of the extended reach and capacity of China's Party-state and an important vehicle to demonstrate its competency as a dam builder. The open moment was not to be.

The land politics of Three Gorges confirms this reassertion of existing power relations. Local farmers’ land claims were undermined, compensation was inadequate, and new land allocations were small. Instances of local-level resistance were largely responses to these inadequacies of the local state rather than to the Dam itself (Wilmsen and Webber, 2016). Instances of ‘rightful resistance’ (O’Brien, 2013) such as petitions did take place as did local demonstrations, disruption to resettlement construction, refusals to move, and attempts to return to original homes (Wilmsen and Webber, 2016). These events were generally met with local instances of violence and detention to serve as a lesson to deter others. Clearly, as the authors identify, state-society relations ultimately shape rupture's generative potential.

We do nonetheless see evidence of what Stoler (2013) describes as the ‘rippling creativity of destruction’ in the development potentials generated through the Three Gorges Dam. Spurred by developments in the region, livelihoods, and class positions have been fundamentally rearranged (Wilmsen, 2016, 2018a, 2018b). In the Three Gorges, the first author's research has documented how initial impoverishment among resettlers (Wilmsen et al., 2011) gave way to a thriving specialised orange industry supported by regional development plans and the central Party-state (Wilmsen, 2018b). While the reduction in farm diversity was risky, it has proved lucrative and has nurtured a strong smallholder economy. That said, as much as 30% of the population have not captured the development potential of the Dam and have been forced to migrate in search of better opportunities (Wilmsen et al., 2021).

Mahanty et al. rightfully note that ‘affective, subjective experience is an important lens through which to understand rupture's generative potential’. They focus on the role of emotions in immobilising or galvanising the actions of affected people. However, scholars are also caught up in the affect of dams and can contribute to dam-centric views of socio-ecological change. Academic research may reach a fever pitch during and immediately after dam construction, but few stay on beyond that. The risk is we overwrite complex histories of colonisation, marginalisation, resource extraction, contestation and slow violence. A rupture analytic asks us to take a more expansive and non-linear view and it asks us to stay in place (and not be too dam focused) in order to do this.

Concluding comments

There is much to be gained here by thinking through dams as rupture. While a lot of work in critical hydropolitics already draws attention to the inherently spatial nature of dams and their effects, and to their ambiguous temporalities (through concepts such as hydrosocial territories and a growing focus on the after-lives of infrastructure), there is value in drawing this together in a coherent way. We might ask though: are all dams ruptures; and, what else constitutes a rupture? Our own work suggests that rupture episodes take place not only in frontier settings, and that complex interbasin transfers designed to change geographies of water could also be thought of as ruptures. We are less sure of the place of small dams in this analytic. As we think through the Three Gorges Dam as a rupture, some further clarity is needed on methods: do the authors consider that a rupture analytic demands interdisciplinarity given its expansiveness? We are also left wondering how exactly to examine preceding, sometimes historical processes, that is, the politics of making a dam placeable and people displaceable. How do we do this without simply studying ‘everything’?

There are a couple of instances where this analytic sits in tension with our own and our colleagues’ work. These are related to the Dam slipping in and out of focus. First is the claim that through an analytic of rupture, we can better grasp how and why nature-society frictions are intensifying. In our minds, this has to involve identifying the very specific set of actors that set these processes (of dam construction, dam delay, dam failure) in train. Basically, who is to blame? We know who finances and constructs big dams and who carries expertise about big dams (Han and Webber, 2020). While these actors have complex relationships to already-existing land conflicts and development interventions, surely part of a rupture analytic is to ‘point the finger’ to better enable activism, intervention, resistance, and counter-narratives.

Second is the infrastructure itself. It is difficult to understand the impacts of the Three Gorges Dam without coming to terms with its materiality: just what was involved in building the world's largest hydropower dam. The now rich geographic literature on infrastructure raises so many questions about the work of maintenance, material inputs like concrete, processes of decay, and ripples of finance, labour and expertise that are not bound by a single event or project. We want an expansive view of change and to look well beyond the boundaries of ‘the project’, but we equally do not want to lose sight of the nature of the catalyst.

Finally, we are forced to consider how our methods might need to change to use the notion of rupture empirically. Long-term research is clearly essential to capturing complex temporalities, ongoing spatial and material interactions and the generative potential of rupture episodes (Wilmsen, 2016; Wilmsen and van Hulten, 2017). Building teams across disciplines and often countries is also difficult but critical, as is co-producing research with those impacted by rupture episodes. Thinking about our decades studying the Three Gorges Dam and other mega-water projects in China, practically speaking, we need to put some boundaries around our analysis or the scope of rupture is potentially endless. To fully realise rupture as a new framework for understanding socio-ecological change, we need to determine how exactly to put it to work.