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Dialogues@RU is published
annually
by the
Writing Program at
Rutgers, The State
University of New Jersey
Volume Three
Spring 2004
The Three Gorges Dam and the Influence of Globalization in Central China - Page 4
by
Boleslaw Czachor
Commentary: “The Three Gorges Dam”
by
Amanda Smith
The juggernaut of globalization, with the often dramatic economic and political transformations it catalyzes, becomes an increasingly important policy issue as the world population enters the 21 st century. As the spread of capitalism necessitates greater exploitation of both human labor and natural resources, critical assessments of the costs and benefits and the political and economic stakes involved are imperative. Boleslaw Czacho r’s essay, “The Three Gorges Dam and the Influence of Globalization,” provides such an assessment, inventively employing the theoretical concepts “obfuscation” and “creative destruction” to explore the nuances of the globalization process via the case study of China’s Three Gorges Dam project. As Czachor shows, these nuances include not only the potential environmental damage wrought by technological interventions such as the Dam, but also the rhetorical manipulations of opponents and proponents of the project.
Starting from a pessimistic (but perhaps realistic) assumption regarding the inevitability of globalization, Czachor develops his thesis by using the analytic frame to expose the motivations of Chinese government officials who have manufactured half-truths in order to preempt resistance to the Dam. The government, Czachor advances, views the Dam’s potentially detrimental impact on both the human and wildlife population as being worth the resultant possibility of an increased supply of electricity. This “creative” aspect of the “destruction,” thus, justifies, in the government’s estimation, “obfuscating” the evidence of past disasters which otherwise might (pardon the pun) damn the Three Gorges Dam project. Though at times it is slightly unclear whether Czachor’s use of “creative destruction” is sardonic-as might be apt given the death toll statistics he cites-or sincere, generally his two-part analytical frame serves this portion of his analysis well, enabling the reader to understand both what motivates the government and what means officials utilize to achieve their desired ends.
The second part of Czachor’s project is a critique of the existent literature written on the Three Gorges Dam project—a literature including voices that support and oppose the Dam. As Czachor shows in this portion of his essay, Chinese government officials are not the only agents of “obfuscation.” Engineers with a financial interest in the realization of the Dam project, Czachor notes, conveniently minimize the potential damage the Dam will inflict, while activists opposing the Dam, by contrast, exaggerate the negative impact to the same “obfuscating” effect. In exposing the distortions of both sides of the debate, Czachor ultimately hopes to empower the populace to sift through the layers of “obfuscation” and act in their own interests. Czachor is perhaps a bit naïve in assuming that his theoretical concepts can elucidate, with finality, the “true” account of the Dam project-a flaw which leads him to resolve the conflicts and contradictions surrounding the Dam project a bit too facilely in his conclusion. Nonetheless, his essay is on the whole an engagingly written, cogently argued contribution to the conversation on one of the 21 st century’s most pressing policy issues.
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