From China Confidential Blog (link):
China completed construction Saturday of a great new wall–the main span of the giant Three Gorges Dam, which is designed to power Shanghai and other cities on the booming eastern seaboard.
The project’s pedigree is impressive. Chinese Nationalist leader Sun Yat-Sen first proposed building a giant dam to tame the Yangtze back in 1919. In 1956, Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong went for a swim in the river–commonly called China’s Golden Waterway–and penned a poem to commemorate the event, envisioning a “great wall of stone” from which “a smooth lake” would arise among the narrow gorges.
See also “Big dams, big problems” by The Guardian (link)
