Huang Wanli

The Sanmenxia Dam criticized by Huang Wanli in 2007

Huang Wanli (黄万里; born August 20, 1911 in Shanghai ; † August 27, 2001 ) was a Chinese engineer and hydrologist . He fell out of favor when, at the beginning of the great leap forward, he opposed hydraulic engineering measures such as large-scale river diversions and construction of dams, which were carried out at great expense and initially with the support of Soviet advisors. Above all, he criticized the plans for the Sanmenxia Dam on the Yellow River (Huang He) in the east of Henan Province in China , which is the largest dam in East and Southeast Asia after the storage space and the first dam built on the Yellow River. He correctly predicted that the Yellow River would fill the reservoir with sediment very quickly. Mao Zedong himself attacked Huang Wanli in an editorial published in June 1957 by Renmin Ribao, accusing him of harming the party, promoting bourgeois democracy and admiring foreign cultures.

Life

Huang Wanli was born in Shanghai in 1911. His father, Huang Yanpei, was a well-known revolutionary whose high position and international reputation later offered Hung Wanli some protection from the attacks because of his dissenting views. Huang Wanli was trained as an engineer in China and witnessed the great flooding by the Han Jian in 1931 and a dam break on the Yellow River in 1933. He went to the USA to study meteorology . After helping to build the Norris Dam in Tennessee, he received his PhD from the University of Illinois. After completing his doctorate, he visited a large number of dams in the United States and returned to China in 1937 to work in hydraulic engineering.

After the proclamation of the People's Republic of China in 1949, he worked, among other things, as a consultant to a hydraulic engineering authority and from 1953 he was a professor at Tsinghua University . His position allowed him to conduct intensive field research. He examined more than 3,000 kilometers of the course of the river and mainly dealt with the problem of sedimentation in the construction of dams. He found the plans for the construction of the Sanmenxia dam worrying. He sent the responsible planning authority a position paper in which he stated his concerns about the hydraulic engineering project planned by Soviet experts. Huang Wanli's concerns should prove to be correct: the reservoir of the Sanmenxia Dam is now largely filled with sediment because the sludge of the Yellow River is deposited in large quantities. This was not initially foreseen and initially there were no openings in the dam to flush the lake. In 1964, a large part of the storage space (around 60%) was silted up. Every year it filled with another 10 billion m³. At times the dam had less than 10% of the original storage space. The sediments also prevent the turbines in the hydropower plant from generating electricity because they become clogged.

In the second half of the 1950s, in a journal published by Qinghua University, Huang Wanli attacked in a short story people who only said what the Communist Party wanted to hear. The people he was referring to were only superficially encrypted. He also defended the Chinese economist Ma Yinchu , who had fallen into political disgrace for his references to the consequences of excessive Chinese population growth in the 1950s, when Mao Zedong believed that rapid population growth was necessary for China's development path. On June 8, 1957, shortly before the start of the anti-rights campaign in the People's Republic of China, the Renmin Ribao published a scathing criticism of Huang Wanli's short story, which in Mao's own words Shenme Hua? (Translation about: What kind of nonsense is that?) Was overwritten. The main point of attack was Huang Wanli's rejection of the planned dam construction on the Yellow River. Huang Wanli was banned from teaching after the article appeared. He was sentenced to a labor camp and forced to help build a dam. The measures against Huang Wanli continued during the Cultural Revolution , and his children had to indict him in self-criticism meetings. Huang Wanli was not rehabilitated until after Mao Zedong's death. He was also one of the notable Chinese critics of the Three Gorges Dam and turned against this plan in letters to Jiang Zemin and US President Bill Clinton .

literature

• Judith Shapiro: Mao's war against nature - Politics and the Environment in Revolutionary China . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2001, ISBN 0-521-78680-0

Individual evidence

1. ^ Zhang Ming: How Chinese science lost its backbone
2. ^ Frank Dikötter: Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–1962 . Bloomsbury, London 2010, ISBN 978-1-4088-1219-8 , p. 26
3. ↑ Shapiro, p. 51
4. ↑ Shapiro, p. 53
5. ↑ Shapiro, p. 55