#xiaowan

A few weeks ago I travelled many hours to get to my friend 李泰雄’s home in Lincang County, Yunnan (China). It was the most rural place in China I had ever been. To get to his house, I had to take multiple buses (the kind where large sacks of grains and frequent stops on the side of the road to pick of passengers are commonplace) and ride on the back of a motorcycle through the mountains before hiking a half hour in the darkness on a dirt road to get to his small village. The nearest bus stop where we got off was in the town of 小弯, a place so small it doesn’t even have a bus station, just three busses parked on the side of the road. Yet, it is also the namesake of a nearby hydroelectric dam, Xiaowan (小弯) Dam, - a monstrosity of concrete amidst a sea of mountains - which I just found out is the world’s tallest arch dam, China’s second largest hydroelectric dam project (behind the Three Gorges), and a very, very controversial project around the world. That’s because the Xiaowan Dam is built upon the Lancang River, outside of China known as the Mekong River, and its engineered control of the Mekong’s flow is predicted to (and has already begun to) devastate the Mekong’s ecosystem, specifically its fishery (the world’s second largest) which tens of million Southeast Asians (including ¾ of Cambodia’s population) depend upon for both sustenance and income. The importance of this dam cannot be understated; its existence is central in debates on Sustainable Energy in both China and globally, Industrialization, Economic Development and not only China-Southeast Asian Relations but International Relations as a whole. This dam and all the baggage it comes with was only kilometers away from me, but as I feasted on freshly slaughtered chicken in a wooden house with sparse electricity, its global significance was nearly imperceptible. For my friend’s grandparents, who were never educated and therefore can’t speak or read Mandarin, let alone recognize universal symbols, it is almost beyond thought.