1y ago

Yuntai: Hiker finds pipe feeding China's tallest waterfall

www.bbc.com

A controversy over a waterfall has cascaded into a social media storm in China, even prompting an explanation from the water body itself.

A hiker posted a video that showed the flow of water from Yuntai Mountain Waterfall - billed as China's tallest uninterrupted waterfall - was coming from a pipe built high into the rock face.

The clip has been liked more than 70,000 times since it was first posted on Monday. Operators of the Yuntai tourism park said that they made the "small enhancement" during the dry season so visitors would feel that their trip had been worthwhile.

"The one about how I went through all the hardship to the source of Yuntai Waterfall only to see a pipe," the caption of the video posted by user "Farisvov" reads.

162 comments

Fake nature is the pinnacle of capitalism. Yes I include China
- China is really refining capitalism into its own new monster.
  Idk who’s capitalism monster scares me the most now.
  
  who’s capitalism monster
  Indeed: who is capitalism monster, really?
  Initially I thought you meant 'whose', but this is funnier.
- Although- what would you consider fake nature? There is a wetland park that was artificially turned into a wetland after reclaiming farmland for it. But it's also legitimately a wetland with all the native plants and animals that go with it and it serves the same sort of water filtration purpose of a real wetland.
  So is it fake nature?
  I am in no way a fan of capitalism, but let's define terms here.
- Yes I include China
  Are you a Maoist, then?
- Literally the government doing it. How is that capitalism?
  
  There is a vast resource of nearly all of humanity's collective knowledge that you can tap to learn why a govt doing something doesn't mean it's not capitalism.
  
  State Capitalism
  a political system in which the state has control of production and the use of capital.
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capitalism
  
  CCP is just a business. The richest by design of course
  
  Literally
  There are other adverbs.
  
  Same people.
  
  Capitalism is when bad things happen.
Someone's gonna get jailed for revealing state secrets and embarrassing the party.
- According to the article, it's something China does regularly to waterfalls and they don't deny it.
  Huangguoshu Waterfall, a famous tourist destination in the southwestern Guizhou province, has been helped by a water diversion project from a nearby dam since 2006 to maintain its flow during the dry season.
  
  With a carefully-crafted explanation like that, it almost sounds like a positive.
This doesn't seem all that awful to me. The waterfall isn't fake, it's just something they do in the dry season so visitors don't feel like they wasted a trip. It's not the choice I would make if I were running the park, but it doesn't seem that bad to me.
- If you go check a waterfall in the dry season and expect it to be pouring water like it was monsoon season, you deserve to be disappointed.
  
  I tend to agree with you, nature should be experienced as-is, imo. I just don't think this is that terrible.
- It can mislead visitors about the severity of climate change... and it can impact the local ecosystem, if there are organisms around the waterfall that depend on there being a dry season each year.
  
  If it is dry due to climate change I don't see how there is an eco-system built around the drought worth preserving.
- Lol this guy bought it.
- When I was I Niagara they did the opposite. They'd divert water into pipes bypassing the falls and "turn down" the falls at night.
- It feels kinda gross to me. Like painting mountains white to simulate glaciers at Glacier National Park for people that flew on super carbon intensive planes to take pictures of the painted mountains. The glaciers all melted out due to climate change.
- There’s already a dam at Hetch Hetchy. All they need now is some pumps and pipes to bring more tourists to Yosemite Valley in Summer.
  
  I work near Yosemite, we don't need one extra body there in the summer at all.
When they wrote this "promted explanation from the water body itself" I thought it was some funny wording for a water agency or sth, not that they'd actually attempt to word their answer as if it's from the waterfall itself, lol.
The park later posted on behalf of the waterfall saying, "I didn't expect to meet everyone this way". "As a seasonal scenery I can't guarantee that I will be in my most beautiful form everytime you come to see me," it adds. "I made a small enhancement during the dry season only so I would look my best to meet my friends."
- So the waterfall itself installed a pipe? I know it's trying to be whimsical, but that part makes so sense whatsoever even in that context.
  
  Don't be ridiculous. It called one of its contractor friends to install the pipe for them.
Ha! Actually fake and gay!
Waterfalls cause rainbows.
- Literally this
  Untrue and joyous
  
  Joious
Everything in china is fake part 3000
- Honestly that kind of phrase sounds like a remnant of the old, prejudice-clad world. Why continue with this ?
  
  Okay
  Everything in china is fake except for the Uyghur genocide part 3001
I went to Niagara Falls last year and I was disappointed to find out that they could control the flow or even stop the flow of water going down the falls and sometimes did so in winter. But they also didn't make a secret of it.
- They turned it off once to clear rubble underneath it so it looked more spectacular.
- I had no idea. That is kinda disappointing lol
  
  Only if you ignore WHY it has the ability to do that. The reason is the hydroelectric power plant, or more specifically the construction of the plant, required that they divert the falls for a couple years a LONG time ago. They have maintained the capacity to divert the flow of the river to ensure that they are able to perform maintenance on the plant and the various national park infrastructures around the falls. The seasonal diversions are usually to perform said maintenance as well as to protect parts of the power plant from freezing. It is actually one of the great engineering marvals of the early 20th century.
  
  It is, but they're still really beautiful. The area is a big tourist trap, but the falls themselves are worth it.
  
  Why?
- I don't get why would that be disappointing?
  
  Because you think you're seeing a purely natural wonder but it turns out to be at least somewhat orchestrated.
  It doesn't take away the beauty of what you're looking at, but it does take away some of the feeling behind that beauty if that makes sense.
Damn son, even waterfalls in China are fake? What isn't fake in China?!
- The Concentration Camps are real.
- Uyghur genocide
- I'm not saying china doesn't have problems, but it's this kind of attitude that sends us down the path of us vs them that I think is toxic and leads to nationalism.
  I have no issue with people criticising things in other countries, just not be absolute about it.
  There most certainly are many not fake things in China that are great. Friendly people, wonderful food, natural wonders (this and perhaps some others excepted, but still), beautiful villages etc.
  Just as there are bad things too, historical and contemporary.
  Only a sith deals in absolutes.
  "Oh this is whack, the park authority/ Chinese government faking a waterfall? That's pretty shit." 👍 An opinion I think many could agree with and is a valid criticism.
  "Everything in China is fake" 👎 No it isn't.
  
  Unfortunately lemmy is by and large pretty racist, and totally unable to handle any form of nuance. I don't really know why people who consider themselves heroicly leftwing are like this but I think it's because complexity is uncomfortable compared to just deciding you know it all and biewing the world as divided into teams of good vs evil.
  
  I most meant it as a joke tbh
Now that we know how to build a water fall from scratch, it's just a matter of time until the world record of the highest water fall will be in Saudi Arabia or Quatar...
- "The world's largest waterfall is fed by the world's second-biggest pump. The world's biggest pump is used for the air conditioning that keeps the surrounding forest at a pleasant 20°C cooler than natural temperatures."
- Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  https://piped.video/Cvc7VymDa4c
  https://piped.video/AynNsPs9i80
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
- ehmmm, every city in every country I have heard of does something like this when an international event will take place.
  Not saying the Chinese may not over do it... but this is common practice in the Western World as well
  
  Did you actually watch the videos?
  They were spraying the trees green because they were dead. Elsewhere they might power wash ground, and maybe replace broken windows in abandoned buildings so they look new, possibly do some weeding, but they're not painting trees because the trees are not dead. If the trees are dead you've got a serious issue.
  
  Yep we all paint our dogs to look like pandas over here
Farisov who? We, the chinese government, have never heard of, not has there every been a user by the name of Farisov... Please go on about your day.
This was not on my bingo card.
But the TOURISM!
Seems like that one youtube channel won the recent algorithm lottery.
I didn’t think I could hate China more. /s
Thanks BBC
There's a whole series on YouTube about how China fakes everything.
- Can I get a link? Sounds like a solid watch while im playing Noita, and failing miserably.
  
  https://youtu.be/PA78KBYNEbw
- it's not just china. its everywhere in east and southeast asia. the chinese tourists wouldn't even care that the waterfall is fake. they get off the bus and take selfies with it, and then get back on the bus. they have no interest in anything else.
People will really jump on any random thing to bash China. I'll give kudos to British state media that this constant deluge of insignificant nonsense makes it really hard to have any discussion about China that's based on like, broad trends in history or economics.
Parks do water management. At Niagra Falls, for example, much of the water is used for power generation at night, but during the day more of it goes over the falls for the benefit of tourists. You've probably never heard about it, because it doesn't matter. At all.
But make it about another tribe, about the outgroup, and suddenly it's the most important thing in the world and proves everything we always suspected and blah blah blah. Go volunteer at your local park.
- Speak for yourself, as far as I'm concerned China has lost all credibility with this story. Faking a waterfall ? That's grounds for economic sanctions
  
  Xi Jinping reading about this story like
- The video was posted on Weibo by a hiker, which suggests the hiker is Chinese. So blame the Chinese for making this known since they then viewed and shared it thousands of times.
  
  You say "thousands" as if that's a lot. If some Chinese people want to talk about a park's water management, I don't mind. But when Westerners take some random trivial thing like this and use it to fuel a narrative that "China is a country full of lies," or whatever, that's an entirely different animal. This is a local issue, not an excuse for chauvanists to be chauvanist.
- Ok Tankie!
  
  Being a tankie is when you don't care about water management at a park on the opposite side of the world, even though your state hates their state.
- Last I checked, Buffalo wasn’t pumping water up the falls just to make it roll down through the turbines, but if you have legit sources showing otherwise I’d be most happy to see them comrade
  
  They do control the amount of water that flows down the falls. I was there last year. They also come right out and say so.
  
  Where did I claim they were? I believe what I said is "Parks do water management." And beauty and tourism are concerns that they take into account. This is a non-story.

162 comments