长江边 Cháng Jiāng biān — By the Yangtze

One river, a third of the country, and a dam people argue about

The Yangtze is 6,300 kilometres long, the third longest river in the world, and it is the organising fact of central and eastern China. Its basin covers about 1.8 million square kilometres — roughly a fifth of the country's land — holds well over four hundred million people, and produces something like a third to two fifths of China's economic output. The cities strung along it are the ones this course has been visiting: Chongqing far upstream, Wuhan in the middle, Nanjing lower down, and Shanghai where it meets the sea. Wuhan, where this dialogue is set, exists because of the river. It is three cities grown together — Wuchang, Hankou and Hanyang — at the point where the Han river joins the Yangtze, and it has been the trans-shipment point between the upper and lower river for centuries. It is a bluntly practical, hot, industrial, university-heavy city of some eleven million people, and the 1957 Yangtze bridge there was a genuine national landmark, the first to cross the river at all. Wuhan is also, inevitably, the city most of the world first heard of in 2020, and residents are aware of that; it is not a taboo subject but it is not small talk either, and a visitor does better to let a local raise it. The Three Gorges dam is the other thing to know about, and it is genuinely argued about inside China rather than only outside it. Completed in 2012, it is the largest power station in the world by installed capacity, generating on the order of a hundred terawatt-hours a year — real coal not burned — and it has improved flood control on a river whose floods killed hundreds of thousands of people in the twentieth century, and made the upper river navigable by much larger vessels. It also displaced somewhere between 1.3 and 1.4 million people, drowned hundreds of towns and a great deal of archaeology, has changed sediment flow downstream in ways that are still being studied, and has been linked by some researchers to increased seismic and landslide activity in the reservoir area. Chinese engineers, officials, environmentalists and displaced residents hold every combination of these positions, and the argument is technical as well as political. This course has no verdict; what a learner needs is to know what the sides are. A note on scale, since it is this lesson's subject. Foreign visitors consistently underestimate Chinese numbers, and the reason is partly linguistic — the 万 and 亿 problem — and partly that there is no comparison available. Wuhan is not a provincial town; it is larger than London. There are more than a hundred Chinese cities with over a million people. 相当于 is genuinely the most useful verb in this lesson, because the honest response to most Chinese figures is Alex's: 这种规模我想不出来.