Drowned Homes, Broken Lives: How Tibet’s Tofu Dams Build China’s Green Tyranny

A multipolar world populated by green power centers from the global south is what China advocates on the international stage. Why, then, is its dam-building in Tibet aimed to completely the opposite effect?

Tibet is often described as the world’s third pole, a land of rising mountains, vertiginous valleys, sliding glaciers and once free-flowing rivers, where outstanding biodiversity and geological complexity furnish humankind with a treasure trove of natural and spiritual richness.

Bordering India and China, it straddles the headwaters for culturally and economically vital rivers that flow through both heavyweights, not to mention the Indo-Chinese Peninsula. Its mineral riches are as replete as the pharmaceutical possibilities implied by its numerous world-unique plant species.

These features ought to combine to establish a regional power innately endowed with wealth and clout, one that, with its pastoralist heritage of stewardship towards the natural world, could perhaps suggest a less intrusive and exploitative pathway to development if it was accorded the right to democratic self-determination.

Yet, as described in a report released in May by Turquoise Roof, a collective of Tibet-focused specialists, scholars and analysts, these strengths are being usurped and partially destroyed by the Chinese government, which, having invaded and occupied Tibet since 1950, is aggressively arrogating its resources in order to enmesh the country within itself and render the energy economy of the future dependent on its whims.

Titled “Occupying Tibet’s rivers: China’s hydropower ‘battlefield’ in Tibet,” the report takes as its starting point the recent protests in the Derge area of Kardze in the Tibetan region of Kham, which is currently administered as part of Sichuan Province. In February of this year, Derge broke out into protest over plans to evict families and monks from 12 villages and six monasteries to make way for one section of a dam cascade upstream on the Yangtze River, where it is known as the Jinsha to Mandarin-speakers or the Drichu to Tibetans.

Even though protesters donned the Chinese flag to emphasize that their actions were not aimed at “splittism,” the lowest of crimes in Beijing’s eyes, and religious leaders prostrated themselves in front of Chinese Communist Party officials, their pleas for their homes and heritage resulted in hundreds of arrests, beatings in custody and a paramilitary-style lockdown that apparently continues to the present moment.

Turquoise Roof places this ongoing incident against the backdrop of China’s wider plans to transform Tibet into a literal battery and generator by ramming vast hydropower installations into mountain valleys and bundling them together with solar and wind technologies, irrespective of the social, cultural and ecological cost.

Constructed under the umbrella of the state-owned coal conglomerate China Huadian Corporation, which has just signed a cooperation deal with Siemens, Derge’s Gangtuo Dam, as the 1.1. million-kilowatt hydropower station is called in Mandarin, will merely be one of 13 that are set to transform formerly unadulterated upper reaches of the Yangtze into something like a series of stepped reservoirs with “captive water levels high enough to lap at the bottom of the dam wall of the next dam upriver.”

Alongside more hydropower that China is locating on other major rivers of Tibet, numerous dangers are foreseen. Environmental concerns range from the disruption of a major migratory bird route and wetlands of international importance covered by the Ramsar Convention to the exorbitant release of greenhouse gasses that are required to form and transport materials for the colossal dam walls. Livelihoods from fisheries may be compromised, an outcome that is already attested in scientific literature for both the Yangtze and the Mekong in relation to the existing artificial segmentation of their waterways downstream.

On the other hand, because more suitable locations for construction have already been exploited, Tibetan dams are now being erected on thick silt beds in a seismically active region where mountains are still rising, rivers still cutting into them. As a result, they are said to be structurally akin to tofu, a metaphor that was made famous during the devastating 2008 Sichuan earthquake. According to some hypotheses, that disaster, which killed at least 90,000 people, may have been triggered by the filling of a large, nearby reservoir, and Turquoise Roof argues that something similar could ensue again alongside other dam-induced geological catastrophes in Tibet.

To make way for these dangers, thousands upon thousands of people are being coercively relocated from their homelands to new government-designated residences where they frequently lack the opportunities or skills to adapt. Food insecurity and malnutrition are wolves at the door due to the resettlement of farmers and nomads, who once produced nourishment for themselves and their families.

Thus, Tibet may be looking not just at a cascade of potential dams, but a cascade of potential dam failures visited upon a local population that is already struggling to make ends meet, and, if that sounds fanciful, it is worth remembering that hydropower facilities built by China’s state-owned companies have not always maintained the highest standards for construction and assessment of impact.

Infrastructure has proven defective in Ecuador, Uganda and Guangxi, where a recent dam failure went unreported by domestic media. As pointed out by Turquoise Roof, Tibet has already suffered a major disaster associated with the establishment of a massive dam known as Lawa Batang, too. And, going back to the previous century, the 1975 collapse of the Banqiao Dam in Henan Province led to the loss of more than 150,000 lives.

So why is China pursuing such risky plans despite the engineering fallibilities and cultural destruction that could result? Partly, the subsummation of rural homes and spiritual centers like the fresco-filled, 13th century Wontoe Monastery can be read as another round in China’s long-term attempts to assimilate Tibetans, a policy that is often justified in ecological or poverty alleviation terms, but which is better understood as breaking up Tibetan communities, leaving them disconnected from their heritage and dependent on the Han state.

However, with renewable energy, other motivations are coming to the fore. The rivers of the Tibetan plateau sit upstream from well over a billion people, conferring significant power on anybody who can conquer their flow. The electricity generated by Tibetan dams can meanwhile be routed to nearby mines, where local reserves of minerals like copper and lithium are extracted in often environmentally calamitous conditions to service the battery, electric vehicle and other industries. It is also sent eastwards to feed China’s factory heartlands.

Hence, the discrepancy between what the Chinese leadership practices and propounds is exposed. While it claims to support a multilateral world in which less affluent countries and peoples are freed from Western domination to fulfill their own developmental destinies, it is determinedly chaining the fate of Tibet to itself in an effort to render any concept of its future independence meaningless.

At the same time, it is establishing ownership of Tibetan lands that confer strategic power over the wider region and exploiting the specific natural features of these lands in order to generate the energy required to rob them of their mineral resources. Then, both the energy and the extracted minerals are supplied to Chinese companies, who, under the direction of the state, can produce a cheap flood of products in the green- and high-tech industries, decimating competitors elsewhere in the world and concentrating yet more wealth and influence in Beijing’s clutches.

An independent Tibet that made its own decisions about its rivers and resources would necessarily temper these hegemonic designs. That is why, in the eyes of the Chinese Communist Party, it can never be allowed to occur.