Destroying to Develop: China's Rise Along the Yangtze River: Big Pics

April 8, 2010 --Try to fathom China by the numbers, and the imagination comes up short. The most populous nation, also by far the largest producer and consumer of coal, steel, and the planets' third-largest economy, is easily lost in statistics.

To understand what it's like to bear witness to its breakneck development, to watch as cities rising out of bare dirt, you have to breathe it all in, like photographer Nadav Kander did.

Over the course of five visits and 2.5 years, Kander traveled the length of the third-longest river on Earth, and China's largest, the Yangtze.

Yangtze means "Long River," and its 4,000 miles are indeed impressive. But its course from the Tibetan plateau east to Shanghai charts more than a great distance -- the river is in many ways China's backbone.

"As far as I can understand, China wouldn't be what it is today without the Yangtze," Kander said in an interview with Discovery News. "It is incredibly important to the Chinese, in their psyche, in their consciousness. The river has formed China."

Today some 400 million people live along the Yangtze, more than the entire population of the United States. And that number is growing rapidly as the country's massive migrant worker population -- another 400 million -- flocks to cities and communities that depend on the river for their economic lifeblood.

Amid all of this development, Kander found a people torn free of their cultural roots to make way for progress.

"Generally, most people are very accepting of government in China," he said. "They look at development as a good thing."

Take the gargantuan Three Gorges Dam, for example. Rising waters displaced over a million people, but China took it in stride. Whole cities were moved to higher ground to make room for the new reservoir. Old buildings were flattened so that boats would not collide with them.

Construction of the dam flooded dozens of archaeological sites and all but spelled the end for the endangered Yangtze river dolphin. When its full compliment of hydroelectric turbines are up and running, they will generate some 22,500 megawatts of electricity, about equivalent to 20 nuclear power plants. The dam is already the largest electrical power plant on Earth.

That is the tension of China that Kander saw and recorded: its people are torn from the old and thrust into the new, whether they like it or not.

Not everyone in the country is comfortable with the country's ever-changing landscape.

"I met a man on a train, and he was very cross about it," Kander said. "He said to me 'you can go back to the (United Kingdom) and go back to the same place. It still feels the same and smells the same. But people here can't go back to where we were,' and I thought, 'why do we have to destroy to develop?'"

Kander added: "There are a lot of similarities with immigrants to America -- people who were just pouring off boats into this alien world where nothing was familiar."

Despite the apparent recklessness, Kander says he thinks the Yangtze's waters are in for a brighter future. The Chinese realize they cannot continue to destroy their environment as their country develops, he argues.

"It's quite easy to point fingers and say that the Yangtze is the biggest source of pollution to the Pacific Ocean, but China is turning it around now," he said. "It's so obvious that the only reason all these factories exist, all of this pollution exists, is purely to supply the greed of the West. It's very much a mirror on the West."

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