The relentless rush to build dams in China's Tiger Leaping Gorge: 'If we lose our land, we lose everything'

LeMonde

07-07-2025

Missing the meeting is out of the question. Every day at 3 pm, four elderly women play cards on a small outside table in front of the seniors' center in the village of Longpan, in China's Yunnan province. From their table perched on the foothills of the Himalayan range, the view is spectacular. The perpetual white snow of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain quickly gives way to a hillside, where a whole palette of green slopes down to the river. At this point in its journey, the river is still called the Jinsha, or the "River of Golden Sand." A few hundred kilometers downstream, the Chinese know it only as the "Long River," the longest in Asia. Foreigners know it as the Yangtze.
The card players, wearing purple-toned jackets of the Naxi ethnic minority, are naturally reserved and focused on their game. When one of them, Wang, whispers a few words to us, it is only to mischievously point out that she wins more often than her friends. In recent months, however, one topic has come up in their conversations, as well as those of many other residents in the Yunnan region: the white posters plastered along the main streets of the villages upstream of the famous Tiger Leaping Gorge, a site popular with hikers and tourists. The posters display a decree from the provincial authorities concerning "the prohibition of new construction and settlement of populations in the flood zone of the Longpan hydroelectric dam project." The decree forbids anyone from moving into the area except for demobilized soldiers, released prisoners returning home, young graduates coming back to their village or newlyweds moving in with their spouse.