A number of conspiracy theories have been popularized following the opening date of the Three Gorges Dam and have spread via social media; according to proponents of such theories, the Three Gorges dam is undergoing structural deformation and is on the verge of breaking and flooding the lower Yangtze region, potentially devastating the area and creating an ecological disaster. Although the Chinese government has denied such claims as unfounded rumor, proponents of the theory allege a campaign of silencing and have persisted in warning about an impending collapse.
Origins
As of 2020, the exact time when theories related to a potential collapse the Three Gorges Dam have begun to spread online is not yet known; such allegations have been covered in the Chinese-speaking media starting from 2019, and again in 2020, although one report alleges that theories about the collapse of the Three Gorges Dam have been circulating online for at least ten years before.
Evidence
found on Google Maps has been cited by proponents of the theory, who claim that a clear deformation of the main dam can be seen on such images. According to an employee of the China Three Gorges Corporation, however, such images are the result of artifacts introduced by the process Google Maps displays satellite images on its website, citing as evidence an older image found on the site between 2005 and 2008 that apparently showed more deformation. According to a German-based hydraulic engineer, Wang Weiluo, who has criticized the Three Gorges Dam project for years, a number of financial abuse by related governmental bureaucrats and rushed construction work have led to structural weaknesses that may cause the dam to fail; nevertheless, Wang denies that a deformation of the kind that proponents of the theory online have alleged based on satellite imagery is possible. According to Wang, since the dam is constructed from individual blocks of varying height, any deformation of the dam would not be “elastic” like that shown in such images. Wang claims that, although he believes the dam to be structurally unsound, it is not structural deformation, but rather leakages in the foundation that he is most concerned about. Wang does not deny, however, that such leakages can lead to a collapse of the dam, and even went as far as to recommend an evacuation of the lower Yangtze region in 2020. Although not specifically responding to Wang's latest claims, Zhang Boting, the president of the China Society for Hydropower Engineering, had written in 2019 that Wang has been “fabricating unsupported rumor” about the dam beginning from 2000, and argued that the latter is unqualified to be a hydraulic engineer. In June 2020, the Ministry of Water Resources of the People's Republic of China officially warned of possible floods in the lower Yangtze region due to strong rainfall that summer; moreover, Ye Jianchun, head of the Ministry of Water Resources, took the rare step of warning of a possible "black swan event" without specifically referring to the Three Gorges Dam. These warnings have been interpreted as evidence of an impending overflow or collapse of the Three Gorges Dam. Guo Xun, a research fellow the Institute of Engineering Mechanics at the China Earthquake Administration in Beijing, denied such rumors and claimed that "the dam is capable of holding far larger inflows than it is seeing now."
Potential impact
The Three Gorges dam, located in Hubei province, has a number of major population centers located downstream, including Shanghai, the most populous metropolitan area in China; proponents of the theory believe that a failure of the dam will lead to vast areas in these cities being flooded and lead to large numbers of casualties. Nevertheless, due to the military significance of the installation and the potential scenario of an attack on it during wartime, the Ministry of Water Resources had created modelling for a potential nuclear attack on the Three Gorges Dam between 1978 and 1988; the ministry had concluded that a dam failure would not lead to catastrophic impact of the population living downstream, and it reiterated this assessment in 2011.
