Thank you very much for the opportunity to participate in this Congressional-Executive Commission on China Roundtable. I am the Executive Director of Probe International, a Canadian-based environmental NGO. For 25 years, we have worked with citizens in Third World countries to help them fight development projects that undermine the environments they depend on.

Since the early 1980s, Probe International has monitored the world’s largest and most controversial dam project, the Three Gorges dam on China’s Yangtze river. We have done so by working with academics, researchers, and press in China, including Dai Qing, the celebrated Chinese journalist who spent 10 months in jail for publishing Yangtze! Yangtze!, a book authored by China’s most eminent scientists and scholars. Probe International translated and published Yangtze! Yangtze! and a subsequent book edited by Dai Qing, called The River Dragon Has Come!. Both books are banned in China. We also published our own damning critique of the dam’s official feasibility study, which was financed by the Canadian government, conducted by Canadian engineers, and used to justify building the Three Gorges dam.

I am also the publisher of Three Gorges Probe, an Internet news service that Probe International began in 1998 to report on Three Gorges and other dams in China. Our goal has been to circumvent the ban on criticism of the Three Gorges dam. We believe that projects like Three Gorges can be built only in the absence of good information about their real costs and benefits, and in the absence of an informed public debate. Our goal is to let the facts, for and against dams, speak for themselves, and to help inform the public by providing the Chinese press, scholars, and activists with a safe forum in which to publish their views. But perhaps our news service’s most important goal is to record and publish details of the harm done by Three Gorges and other dams, in the hope that future generations will be protected from more of the same.

Three Gorges Probe is published in both English and Chinese. The two sites together have close to a quarter of a million page views per month and their readership grew at a rate of almost 150% last year.

Despite the fact that we often publish censored information, our site has generally not been blocked in China and our readers from the mainland have described Three Gorges Probe as the “best,” “most accurate,” and the only “truthful” source of information about the dam. Three Gorges Probe is relied upon by the press, scholars, environmentalists, and grassroots activists. Dam officials also read it: Sometimes, within days of our stories exposing a scandal or a threat to the dam, dam authorities would announce either that the problem doesn’t exist or is being solved. Our stories have ended up on the front pages of the international media, including the New York Times and the UK’s Guardian, on Chinese Internet sites around the world, in the chatrooms of China Youth Daily, Sina.com and even the Changjiang Water Resources Commission.

Here’s a sample of the stories we’ve covered:

1. an exclusive report revealing endemic corruption, debauchery and an underworld that now robs and terrorizes dam evacuees who are being resettled by the Three Gorges dam;
2. the arrest, detention, trial and conviction of four representatives of dam evacuees from Yunyang county who attempted to recover their community’s compensation funds from corrupt local officials by appealing to the Communist Party in Beijing. They were sentenced to two and three year jail terms for “maintaining an illicit relationship with a foreign country” and for “disturbing the public order;”
3. an energy analysis showing that Three Gorges power is more expensive than power from high efficiency gas turbines and cogeneration, and ineffective at displacing coal-fired power;
4. leaked correspondence between China's top leadership admitting that Qinghua University research shows that the dam's flood control benefits are inadequate and “smaller than declared by us." But, warn the correspondents, "never, ever let the public know this;"
5. warnings by two senior members of the Chinese Academy of Engineering that incidents of earthquakes and landslides indicate that the Three Gorges region is geologically unstable, that lives are at risk, and that geological?safety inspections of resettlement zones must be carried out immediately and checked and double-checked;
6. a report on cracks in the dam which are more than a meter deep and run all the way up the huge concrete structure, leading to emergency repair work and promises by dam authorities to take greater care in future;
7. a surprise announcement by dam operators that it would raise the reservoir level from 135 to 139 meters three years ahead of schedule, forcing the emergency evacuation of 1,300 residents from their homes. Independent experts think the reason was to protect electricity output which is threatened by an unexpected rise in the accumulation of silt behind the dam;
8. during the news blackout of the surging anti-dam protests at the Pubugou dam site in Sichuan province last October and November, we reported on the violent clashes with police resulting in several deaths, hundreds of villagers detained, several dozen farmers hospitalized and the emergence of the "dare?to?die brigade" – elderly men and women who taunted the police with shouts of, "Kill us, kill us! We will no longer have to move if you kill us!" (This period was one of the few in which our Web site was blocked.)
9. a report on farmers in Hebei province who risked life and liberty in 2004 to dodge police and gather more than 11,000 signatures on a petition calling for the removal of Zhang He, the former mayor of Tangshan and the city's Communist Party boss. The petition accused Zhang He of stealing compensation funds intended for people who were forced to move in the 1990s to make way for the Taolinkou reservoir on the Qinglong River. Seven of the farmers were arrested by local police as they attempted to deliver their petition to the National People’s Congress. Their lawyer escaped, however, and was chased by Tangshan police around Beijing, from one hiding spot to another, and one computer to another, from which he gave online updates of the unfolding drama and with which he did Google searches to get more information on the "assembly and demonstration law," "the Constitution of the PRC" and "the representative law of the National People’s Congress and people’s congresses at local levels" to assist his clients.
10. we have posted the Chinese, and now the English version, of a remarkable book by a Chinese social scientist, Ying Xing, about the ruinous impacts of the Dahe dam built on a Yangtze tributary 30 years ago and the determination of ordinary citizens who fought for their rights in a 20-year struggle. Many of the 20,000 people affected by that dam are now being forced to move for Three Gorges. The book, The Story of the Dahe Dam, was published in China to great acclaim in 2001, and was banned six months later. It remains banned today.