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Liu Xiaodong, Hotbed (detail), 2005, oil on canvas, in five panels, Private Collection, Beijing, Courtesy of the artist.

Deirdre Chetham and Orville Schell: A Great Wall The impact of the biggest hydroelectric plant in the world

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  • ABOUT Deirdre Chetham

    Deirdre Chetham, author of Before the Deluge: The Vanishing World of the Yangzte's Gorges, is executive director of the Harvard University Asia Center. She earned her AB from Harvard University in East Asian Languages and Civilizations and did her graduate studies in Chinese anthropology at Columbia University. She has in the past been a regular contributor to the National Geographic News Service, Gemini News Service in London, and Radio Netherlands International. Profile
  • ABOUT Orville Schell

    Orville Schell studied Chinese language at Stanford University and received his MA and Ph.d from the University of California, Berkeley. He has written widely for publications including The New Yorker, Foreign Affairs, the China Quarterly, and the New York Times. He is the author of fourteen books, nine on China. He is director of the Center on US-China Relations at the Asia Society.

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Think Big, I think, is the thought we’re supposed to think and, indeed, I think there is no country in the world where people are thinking bigger, there is no place, I think, where the conditions enable people to even imagine projects of the size that you’ve just seen here: the Three Gorges Dam.       

Click play to listen. Recorded on October 11, 2008.

The world’s largest and arguably most notorious dam stretches nearly a mile and a half across the Yangtze River in China. More than ten years in the making and still incomplete, the Three Gorges Dam has created a 400-mile reservoir and displaced at least one million people. Orville Schell, a long-time to The New Yorker, author of Virtual Tibet: Searching for Shangri-La from The Himalayas To Hollywood (2000) and Mandate of Heaven: The Legacy of Tiananmen Square and the Next Generation of China's Leaders (1995), and director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Deirdre Chetham, executive director of the Harvard Asia Center and author of Before the Deluge: The Vanishing World of the Yangtze’s Three Gorges, examine the various impacts—human, cultural, environmental, and political—of the biggest hydroelectric plant in the world.

Above: Liu Xiadong, Hotbed (detail), 2005, oil on canvas, in five panels. Courtesy of the artist.

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