For the Lamps of China

. . . .At Chu-t'ang a straight cleft yawns:

At Yen-yu islands block the stream.

Long before night the walls are black with dusk;

Without wind white waves rise.

The big rocks are like a flat sword:

The little rocks resemble ivory tusks. . . .

Thus in 518 A.D., the Chinese poet, Po Chui, expressed his alarm at the roaring Yangtze gorges in Central China, the bottleneck through which the waters of the 3,000-mile-Iong river pour out of the Szechwan basin and Tibetan foothills onto the flat paddies of China's rice bowl. Then as now, the enormous power of the Yangtze ran wild in floodtime while the Chinese shrugged ia resignation. Even now, damming the Yangtze is a bigger job than China can cope with.

Report from the Front. In 1943, Dr. John Lucian Savage, top U.S. Bureau of Reclamation civil engineer, who had gone to Chungking at Chinese invitation to study potential hydropower sites, asked to visit the Yangtze gorge. The bleak area was a fighting zone, but the Chinese Army guaranteed Savage safe conduct. In quiet broken by occasional rifle shots from the sleeping front, Savage charted possible dam sites except those above Ichang at the mouth of the gorge, which was in Jap hands.

His enthusiastic but necessarily incomplete report infected the Generalissimo, who instructed the Chinese National Resources Commission to continue the Savage investigation. To do this job, the Chinese asked the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation for technical help. They did not suggest a loan.

Last week, the still unfinished Savage report was gathering dust--on State Department desks. Reasons for the delay were a State Department secret. Apparently, the U.S., instead of promoting the great market that cheap power might create in China, was unwilling to admit: 1) that China, like the U.S., must make her postwar plans now; 2) that China will one day become a great world industrial power.

The Biggest. On thin paper, the dam is the greatest waterpower project in the world, easily overshadowing the U.S.'s Boulder and Grand Coulee Dams, and Russia's Dnieprostroy. As projected, it will take six years and one billion dollars to build, will soar some 700 feet above its foundations, back up water for about 400 miles, and produce a staggering 10,000,000 kilowatts of electric power. It will control the floods that have devastated Central China, dry up disease-breeding lakes on the plains below the gorge, irrigate about 60 million acres, employ thousands, and, among other things, provide power for a string of greatly needed fertilizer factories. A lock system on the man-made lake will permit 10,000-ton steamers to sail from Shanghai to Chungking itself.

China will need the aid of U.S. money, resources, and engineering skill to complete its Yangtze project. But U.S. aid would not be pure altruism. Such a huge source of power would gradually alter much of China's backward economy, giving her a new capacity to repay the cost, and at the same time making her industries and people customers for U.S. electrical equipment.

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