Welcome to Foreign Policy’s China Brief.
The highlights this week: Construction begins on a controversial megadam in Tibet, exit bans are being imposed on U.S. citizens, and rural toilets come under investigation.
China Breaks Ground on a Record-Breaking Dam
Chinese Premier Li Qiang announced over the weekend that construction had begun on a megadam on Tibet’s Yarlung Tsangpo river.
The megadam is set to become the world’s largest hydropower system and, costing an estimated $167 billion, by far the most expensive megadam of all time. It is anticipated to provide 300 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity annually, or around 4 percent of China’s energy needs.
Megadams are highly controversial. While nominally a clean form of power generation, they can have profound ecological and social consequences.
In China, construction of the Three Gorges Dam, the world’s current largest hydropower project, required the displacement of 1.3 million people. It continues to be a source of anxiety for the public, given repeated fears of a catastrophic dam collapse. For context, the collapse of the Banqiao Dam in Henan province in 1975—whose storage capacity was around one-sixtieth of the Three Gorges Dam—killed approximately 230,000 people through initial flooding and later starvation and illness.
The displacement and destruction caused by dams are particularly sensitive in Tibet, where the Chinese government has conducted a decades-long program of forcible resettlement. This agenda, alongside practices of ethnic discrimination and cultural and religious oppression, has accelerated under Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Just last year, Chinese authorities violently cracked down on protests against another Tibetan dam project that is currently under construction, which would submerge a culturally and religiously significant area home to several villages and ancient monasteries.
From Beijing’s perspective, the risks of building dams are irrelevant given the possible benefits for carbon emissions and electricity costs. Cheap electricity matters not only for Chinese households but also for industry, where prices per kilowatt-hour are 60 to 70 percent lower than in Europe and 30 to 40 percent lower than in the United States. Although China has become a world leader in renewable energy, it still fundamentally relies on coal generation to keep electricity prices low. The Tibetan megadam may help to offset that.
Any Tibetan protests against the new megadam will do little to change the authorities’ minds. Controlling water has been a symbol of government power and legitimacy in China for millennia, what Sinologist Karl Wittfogel has dubbed as an example of “hydraulic despotism.” One of China’s mythical founders, Yu the Great, was supposedly the world’s first dam builder.
Historically, gigantic water control projects have sometimes led to political disaster. For instance, the brief-lived Sui Dynasty (581-618) constructed the Grand Canal to ferry men and arms to a futile war against a Korean kingdom, but it instead brought about famine, rebellions, and the eventual collapse of the dynasty.
Although the impact of the new megadam on Tibetans may matter little to Beijing, it could have noteworthy diplomatic effects.
The dammed river, the Yarlung, feeds into India’s Brahmaputra River, and while some Indian commentators think the new dam may help with flood control, others are concerned about its potential impact on water supply and irrigation. In southern China, the damming of the Mekong River—both within China itself and by Chinese-backed projects in Laos and Cambodia—has had a severe impact on downstream countries.
At present, though, public discourse around the Tibetan megadam seems to mostly be an excuse for Indian and Pakistani politicians to snip at each other rather than a source of severe blowback for Beijing. Himanta Biswa Sarma, the chief minister of India’s northeastern province of Assam, claimed that Pakistan was using the dam as a “baseless attempt” to conjure up a water crisis. It’s an issue of particular import since India and Pakistan are in the middle of tense negotiations over the future of the Indus Waters Treaty.
There’s not yet an official completion date on the project; the Three Gorges Dam took over a decade to build, but the mountainous conditions in Tibet may make this even harder. It’s also highly likely that costs will balloon, as tends to happen with China’s megaprojects due to both legitimate difficulties and rampant corruption.
What We’re Following
Exit bans for U.S. citizens. This week, new details emerged about two U.S. citizens being subjected to Chinese exit bans—a long-standing pressure tool in which a foreign visitor is prevented from leaving the country without being charged with an offense.
The latest cases involve a U.S. Commerce Department employee and a Wells Fargo banker. The banker, Mao Chenyue, is ethnically Chinese, and it is likely that the Commerce Department employee, who was visiting family, is too.
Beijing has consistently proved more willing to use this kind of coercion against people of Chinese descent, out of a feeling of ownership of the diaspora. Many such cases have involved children or relatives of people who fled China, whom authorities are trying to force to return to the country for punishment.
The seat of power. One of Xi’s long-term priorities has been a “toilet revolution” in China. First launched in 2015, the project looked to replace China’s notoriously ill-kept and paper-less public toilets—still used regularly by many people who lack toilets in their own homes—with shiny and hygienic modern facilities. While originally targeted mostly at tourist sites, over the years the campaign shifted to providing relief to poorer rural areas, though with decidedly mixed results.
But the toilet revolution is ripe fodder for a classic Chinese governmental problem: When campaigns are directed from the top, facilities are often built purely for inspections, not usage. It’s a lot easier to keep a pool, community center, or toilet clean if nobody’s allowed inside.
It turns out that’s been happening with rural toilets. A recent study exposed facilities in Shanxi’s Jishan county that are only open for inspection visits or activities and kept locked up the rest of the time. This has prompted an official investigation from the Jishan government—though it’s unclear whether this is really the government’s No. 1 priority.
FP’s Most Read This Week
- Biden’s Team Lied About Gaza. It’s Time to Hold Them Accountable. by Matthew Duss
- When the Threat Is Inside the White House by Tim Weiner
- Why Rubio’s Asia Visit Was a Total Bust by Derek Grossman
Tech and Business
Tariff delays. Even as U.S. President Donald Trump mulls sweeping new tariffs on the United States’ global trading partners, he has avoided a full confrontation with China on the scale of the post-“Liberation Day” clash. In part, that may be because Beijing doesn’t actually think China is likely to get hit by Trump’s latest threats.
While U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has claimed that Aug. 1 is a “pretty hard deadline” for countries to reach new trade deals with the United States to avoid tariffs, he has also said the supposed 90-day suspension for tariffs on China is likely to be extended.
Given Trump’s track record of following through with threats on China thus far, such as his perpetual refusal to enforce the legally mandated ban on TikTok, Beijing has good reason to call Trump’s bluff.
Rail upgrade. China is set to upgrade its popular high-speed rail network, focusing on improving service quality and technology rather than expanding the system, which has nearly reached its goal of 50,000 kilometers (about 31,000 miles) of coverage.
But as the eminent economic geographer Lu Dadao points out, the system remains costly, overbuilt, and ridden with corruption. The initial process of establishing high-speed rail went wildly over budget and saw so much money embezzled that the entire Railways Ministry was abolished. (A minister who oversaw it is now serving life in prison.)