Harnessing the Hongshuihe
Lan Xinzhen

IN southwest China, there is a river called Hongshuihe, which originates in Yunnan Province, passes through Guizhou and Guangxi and finally flows into the Pacific Ocean via the Pearl River. Because the 638-km river passes through mountains and gorges with steep slopes and drops 762 meters in elevation, it is an abundant source of hydropower. In Tian’e County, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, where the Hongshuihe River passes, a rolled concrete dam of 216.5 meters high holds back the river water. This is Longtan Hydropower Station, the third largest of its kind in China.
Longtan Hydropower Development Co. Ltd. (LHDC) has completed the installation of major parts for testing at the station’s No.6 unit, which is expected to go into production by the end of November. Meanwhile the company has started installing parts at the station’s No.7 unit, expected to be operational by the end of December. The company has invested a total of 24.3 billion yuan ($3.56 billion) in building the Longtan Hydropower Station since July 1, 2001, to install seven units. It began to dam the river in November 2003, and the first unit began to generate electricity in May 2007. The entire nine-year project is scheduled for completion by December 2009. The installment of the No.7 unit means that the overall completion of the Longtan Hydropower Station will be one year ahead of schedule.
Huge economic benefits
According to the construction plan, more than 50 percent of the electricity generated by the Longtan Hydropower Station will be transmitted to Guangdong, which will greatly alleviate the province’s electricity shortages. Since the reform and opening-up policy was launched three decades ago, Guangdong has been one of the engines of China’s booming economy and has developed very rapidly. But its fast economic development has boosted its demand for electricity, resulting in electricity shortages and blackouts. During the past five years, Guangdong has built some large and medium-sized thermal power plants to solve its power supply problem. But because most of the coal and fuel needed by the thermal power plants must be transported from outside the province, the region’s transportation capacity has been strained. The Guangdong Environment Protection Bureau (GEPB) believes the present power source structure, which mainly relies on coal-fueled thermal power in the province, has seriously damaged the ecological environment. The GEPB estimates that sulfur dioxide and acid rain cause economic losses of nearly 40 billion yuan ($5.86 billion) annually, of which human health losses are nearly 700 million yuan ($102.49 million) and agriculture and forestry losses are 2 billion yuan ($292.83 million). Because Guangdong’s sustainable economic and social development has been seriously affected, the provincial people’s congress has made clear several times that the vigorous development and introduction of clean energy should be the major direction of the province’s future energy development.
Longtan Hydropower Station can provide enough high-quality and clean electricity for Guangdong’s sustainable economic and social development. Besides supplying high-quality power, the project also can turn the Hongshuihe River into a “golden waterway,” so that vessels weighing 500 tons can reach the South China Sea from Guizhou Province via the Pearl River. The Hongshuihe River will become a sea-lane connecting the three provinces (autonomous region) of Guizhou, Guangxi and Guangdong. There are abundant reserves of coal and nonferrous metals in areas along the Hongshuihe River. But because there are 300 dangerous shoals, the river cannot be fully opened to navigation. Since land traffic is even more inconvenient, the abundant resources of coal and nonferrous metals cannot be transferred into economic advantages. Now, navigation of this “golden waterway” has opened a passage for transporting coal and mineral resources in Guizhou and Guangxi. The massive development of resources in the Hongshuihe Valley will soon become reality, offering opportunities for local people to get affluent.
Flood prevention
The Hongshuihe Valley used to be a region with frequent floods. Extraordinarily heavy floods hit the valley in 1988, 1994 and 1998, taking a heavy toll of lives and causing huge economic losses. Floods in the Hongshuihe River caused huge amounts of floodwaters to pour into the Pearl River and possibly wreak havoc on the Pearl River Valley. This is one reason why LHDC is speeding up the construction of the Longtan Hydropower Station. The Longtan Hydropower Station’s ability to prevent floods will reduce the economic losses in the Hongshuihe Valley, said Dai Bo, General Manager of LHDC, in a company news release issued on October 15. The normal water storage level of the Longtan hydropower project is 400 cubic meters, its total storage capacity is 27.3 billion cubic meters, and its designed flood-control storage capacity is 7 billion cubic meters, Dai said. The project can impound floodwater at a rate of 8,500 cubic meters per second. Together with the Yantan Dam in the lower reaches of the Hongshuihe River, more than 10,000 cubic meters of floodwater can be impounded per second, so that the lower reaches can withstand even the heaviest flood once in 50 years.
The annual flood-control benefits of the Longtan Hydropower Station can reach 1.02 billion yuan ($149.34 million), Dai said. Should floods like the ones in 1994 and 1998 occur again, the flood-control benefits of the Longtan Reservoir may be more considerable, reducing flooded land by 70,000 hectares and saving 3.04 million lives; hence the hydropower station will become a strategic flood-control project in southwest China, Dai said.
Four world records
LHDC said the Longtan Hydropower Station, the third largest of its kind in China, has set four world records. First, the 216.5-meter-high concrete rolled dam is the tallest of its kind in the world. It is 31.5 meters higher than the Three Gorges Hydropower Station Dam on the Yangtze River. Underneath the Longtan Hydropower Station Dam is the world’s largest underground power-generating workshop, which is 388.5 meters long, 28.5 meters wide and 74.4 meters high. It contains seven generating units, each having an installed capacity of 700,000 kw, the largest single installed capacity in the world equalling that of the Three Gorges Hydropower Station and the Itaipu Hydropower Plant in Brazil.
According to LHDC, the design of the Longtan Hydropower Station has taken into account the shipping value of the Hongshuihe River. Because the river valley where the hydropower station is located has a steep decline in elevation, the designers have installed a ship lift on the dam, with the world’s highest lifting capacity. The ship lift, which is 1,650 meters long, has a maximum lifting height of 179 meters. LHDC has created another record with the fastest construction of a large-scale hydropower station in the world. It will take only one and a half years from the time when the first unit began to generate electricity in May 2007 to the time when the No.6 and No.7 units will generate electricity by the end of this year.
Ecological benefits
Besides its major function of generating power, the Longtan hydropower project also prevents floods and protects the environment. The station has already produced some ecological benefits. After the station’s dam began to store water in 2006, it greatly improved the flow of salt tide to cities in the Pearl River Delta area, including Macao, Zhuhai and Guangzhou.
Winter and spring are the Pearl River’s low-water seasons, when the river’s water levels drop, causing seawater to flood the land alongside the estuary and form a salt tide. As it flows upstream, the salt tide has a negative impact on agricultural and industrial production and residents’ lives. China’s water quality standards stipulate that the amount of chloride in drinking water must be less than 250 milliliters per liter; but when the salt tide flows upstream, it increases the amount of chloride in the drinking water of Pearl River Delta cities to higher than standard levels. Sometimes local tap water facilities must be closed, and the safety of drinking water is seriously threatened. According to figures released by the Pearl River Water Resources Commission of the Ministry of Water Resources, drinking water could not be taken from the Pearl River for 28 consecutive days between the end of 2003 and the beginning of 2004 after an extraordinarily strong salt tide hit Macao, Zhuhai, Zhongshan and Guangzhou.
From November 26, 2005, to January 15, 2006, another extraordinarily strong salt tide hit the Pearl River Delta, and Zhuhai and Macao could not take water from the Pearl River for 48 days. The chloride content at the Guangchang Pumping Station in Zhuhai reached 10,000 milliliters per liter during the strongest salt tide on record. Some residents had to fetch water from nearby hills or buy pure water to drink. In some riverside villages, large patches of crops were wiped out, and farmers had to stop using the land. In some factories, equipment eroded, and production had to be suspended.
In November 2006, Longtan Hydropower Station began to store water. The local media in Guangdong reported that this would modulate the waterline of the Pearl River in the low-water season. In 2007 and the first half of 2008, the water level of the Pearl River did not fluctuate seriously, and water supply in the Pearl River Delta was not threatened by salt tides.

—The Daily Mail-Beijing Review Articles Exchange Item

The way forward
Kofi Annan

THE ink is hardly dry on the communique from Saturday’s Group of 20 meeting, where members pledged to work together to revive their economies. Time, political will and in particular the Obama administration will determine whether the goals and ambitions set out will be realised. But the communique’s significance should not be underestimated.
First, that the pledge should emerge from a G-20 meeting-a forum of advanced and emerging countries-rather than, say, a G-8 or OECD meeting, bodes well for a more inclusive response to the global economic crisis. Events of the past few months have again underscored that no single country or small subset of countries, even the most powerful or wealthy, can manage the forces unleashed in our globalised world. The Washington meeting potentially represents the beginning of an era of unprecedented cooperation for concerted action on other equally pressing issues, such as climate change, food security and poverty reduction.
Second, it is proposing a process and a timetable both to brake if not reverse the slide into global recession, and to reform the international economic architecture. To date, response has been in crisis mode. But the underlying issues require a sustained response, being systemic in nature: insufficient regulation and supervision of the financial markets; unsustainable energy policies; unpredictable and insufficient assistance for the most vulnerable; and uncoordinated macro-economic policies.
These issues could not be more relevant for Africa. The economic meltdown has come at the worst possible time. Notwithstanding the persistence of conflict and untold humanitarian tragedy in far too many places, including the Horn of Africa, Darfur, eastern Congo and Zimbabwe, the continent has enjoyed a decade of real progress, albeit starting from a low base relative to other parts of the world.
Africa has seen growth rates that are higher than in the past, impressive increases in foreign direct investment and breakthroughs in governance, accountability, education, disease control and the quality of life. The current crisis comes as Africa struggles to maintain this positive momentum after a year of rising food prices and unprecedented volatility in fuel costs. Food and fertiliser are punishingly unaffordable for consumers and farmers. Recession and slowdown in high-income countries, as well as China, India and the Middle East, are resulting in plummeting commodity prices and exports, reduced remittance flows and decreases in foreign direct investment.
African leaders face an almost impossible challenge: how to protect their fragile economies and vulnerable people from global recession at a time when their revenues are decreasing. Maintaining levels of public investment is the basis for political stability and achievement of the Millennium Development Goals. Inability to do so could have profound consequences - in terms of unemployment, poverty and social and political tensions. Last week, at the Tunis meeting of African ministers of finance and central bank governors, the outlines of a way forward were agreed: continued macro-economic stability, strengthened regulation and oversight of financial institutions, and renewed efforts to improve governance and accountability structures. African countries want to diversify economic activity, strengthen regional infrastructure and recognise the need to create the conditions to encourage investment and domestic savings.
At a time when private capital flows are diminishing, increased access to loans and grants from the international financial institutions and predictable development assistance, are critical. Failure to honour aid commitments would be a breach of faith and potentially disastrous for the ability of Africa to achieve the Millenium Development Goals. For richer countries, this is not about charity. It is about self-interest. By helping Africa to build roads and railways, power plants, and irrigation and water treatment systems, donors will increase capital exports to Africa at a time when their own industries are facing a collapse of demand.
Aid can be a global stimulus - a powerful way to convert excess capacity in wealthier countries into long-term and high-return benefits, including quick recovery from high unemployment. There is an important brokerage role to be played-to encourage partnerships between governments, development banks, export credit agencies and the private sector to catalyse this two-way stimulus. Development assistance can also contribute to global security. Problems in one country, let alone one continent, cannot be contained within borders. If African countries cannot overcome the many social and economic challenges they face, these problems will spill over rapidly.
Whether the G-20 meeting on Saturday was a success or not now depends upon the follow-up. It will have served us well if it launches a new era of inclusive economic cooperation and diplomacy.

—Khaleej Times

Dr. Fouad Al-Farsy
Geoffrey Robertson

AT the beginning of the political process for the election of the new president of the United States of America, I had my doubts about the likelihood of the election of Barack Obama as president of the US. This was due to intrinsic reasons that I, and others like me, lived through during my years of postgraduate study in America. At that time there were social facts that were considered the norm, and no one could have disregarded them. Truly it was a dream then to think of an African-American as a president.
So when Obama was elected president of the United States of America, I was in a state of bewilderment for several days. I realized that my memory of America — and wrongfully so — was of the past ... A change has really occurred ... A deep fundamental change has occurred in the political and social thought of America with the election of Obama as the president of the United States. Here I must recollect what the president-elect said in his victory speech, that America is changing and a change like this could only happen in America. The strength of democracy and the true will for change are what led to this event.
We must note here the demographics of the American voters: Of the registered voters, 36 percent are Democrats, 33 percent are Republicans and 29 percent are independent (with a 2 percent variable). It is also important to note that 18 percent of the voters were between the ages of 18-24 and 68 percent of those youthful voters voted for Obama.
Of those who voted for Obama, 60 percent were Caucasian and 40 percent African, Hispanic and other minorities. So what occurred in the election of Obama is a real change of the total social fabric of America. The last eight years have led to a real will for change, a desire to bring back to America its leadership role in the world. A leadership role based on justice and equality embedded in principles and ethics.
It seems that by choosing Obama, the Americans have shown the desire to get away from the “John Wayne” mentality and return to the rational dialogue based on common interests, good relations with neighboring countries and respect for the global community. If one is to enumerate President-elect Obama’s priorities for the next four years, one can attempt to argue they will be as follows:
1 - The economy is evidently the first priority, as he expressed this himself. To save America from its financial depression is of paramount importance. The choices he makes of knowledgeable and experienced bipartisan members will enable him to revive the American economy. This will not happen in a short time, it may take more than three years. 2 - It is known traditionally and historically that the Democratic Party has great interest in the individual’s rights of freedom and privacy. President-elect Obama may restore the constitutional rights of American citizens, so they can regain what they missed under the pretence of national security. I envision there will be more fair and just implementation of immigration laws (for citizenship, residency, work) that brings back America’s ideal concept — of its forefathers — of a unique nation in its respect for civil rights in its broad sense.
3 - As for the ill-famed Guantanamo Bay, it will be one of his priorities to end this dark era in the American legal history. In the same geographic frame of interest, the president-elect might start resuming relations with Cuba, ending a long time of sanctions on a neighboring country, in a world undergoing real change.

—Arab News