China has committed itself to becoming a world leader in clean energy—hydropower, wind, solar, and more. Rivers and mountain waters, once seen as blessings to local communities, have become components in its march toward carbon neutrality. Dams generate cheap electricity, promise flood control, irrigation, and fuel rural electrification. They are symbols of progress in Beijing’s narrative.
But progress has a shadow. Many projects have gone ahead with scant regard for environmental impact assessments, displacement of people, loss of biodiversity, or harm to downstream communities. “Green tech” becomes ambiguous when energy is generated at the cost of lives, culture, landscape, and ecological balance.
Unheard Voices Rising
Here are the voices and stories that seldom get front stage—but matter deeply.
1. Fu Xiancai — A Farmer’s Cry
Fu Xiancai, a farmer who lived near the Yangtze River, saw his village and livelihood swallowed by the Three Gorges Dam’s reservoir. He became a vocal critic of the compensation, the resettlement process, and the broken promises of local and central authorities. After speaking to foreign media, he was assaulted; partly paralyzed, physically intimidated.
His is a human voice: someone who lost land, lost home, and whose injuries tell of the cost of grand infrastructure built in the name of the greater good. The state’s narrative rarely includes stories like his.
2. Dai Qing — The Writer Who Wouldn’t be Silenced
An author and journalist, Dai Qing has long spoken against the Three Gorges Dam and similar mega‐projects. Since the 1980s, she has raised concerns about ecological degradation, displacement, and the loss of cultural heritage. Her books Yangtze! Yangtze! and The River Dragon Has Come detailed the risks. She has faced detention, suppression, and censure.
Though her work is often blocked inside China, she continues to inspire environmental scholars, activists, and ordinary people. Her voice says: you cannot measure every success in megawatts; many costs are invisible until it is too late.
3. Wang Yongchen — Guardian of the Rivers and Ethnic Minorities
Wang Yongchen, a journalist and environmental advocate, organized campaigns to stop dam projects on the Nu River (also known as the Salween), one of the last major undammed rivers in China. Her work brings in concerns of ecological diversity—thousands of plant species, many animal species, dozens of ethnic minority groups whose cultures are tied to the river and land.
Wang has urged for transparent environmental assessments, for public hearings, for giving voice to those who would be flooded, displaced, whose sacred mountains and ancestral lands would be submerged.
4. Liu Jianqiang — Investigative Reporter and Chronicler of Green Paradoxes
Liu Jianqiang has repeatedly exposed how dam and infrastructure projects are sometimes pushed illegally, without proper assessment or consultation. He reported on the Tiger Leaping Gorge dam plans in Yunnan; his reporting helped push the central government to pause or re‐examine them.
He argues that environmental activism in China is not just about nature—it’s becoming a democratic movement, a movement for transparency, for accountability. People want to know: who benefits, who sacrifices.
5. Downstream Communities—Thailand, Bangladesh, India, Mekong Basin
It is not only within China that the impact is felt. Activists downstream—Thailand, Cambodia, Bangladesh, India—complain that dam operations upstream in China alter river flows without warning, causing droughts, altering fisheries, affecting livelihoods.
For example, Niwat Roykaew, a Thai activist, has campaigned for China to share water‐release data: the unpredictability in dam operations has hurt farmers downstream, who depend on seasonal flows.
In one recent development, India has lodged formal diplomatic protests over China’s plans for a massive dam on the Yarlung Tsangpo (Brahmaputra) in Tibet, citing ecological disturbance, water rights, and downstream dependency.
6. Protesters at Dege / Derge (Kamtok / Guantuo Dam)
The Kamtok/Guantuo dam (also called Guantuo in some sources) in the Dege region is one of the most prominent cases where Tibetan monks, villagers, monastery leaders, and lay people have resisted.
- In early 2024, hundreds (monks, local residents) protested the Kamtok hydropower project in Derge.
- Their demands: protection of monasteries, ancestral villages, ethical resettlement, preservation of sacred murals and sites.
- The authorities responded with arrests, sometimes beatings, detentions, restricting legal access. Key religious figures from Yena Monastery — Sherab (abbot) and Gonpo (administrator) — were sentenced (4 and 3 years respectively) for opposition to the project.
- Locals point out that affected communities were not consulted; environmental impact assessments (if done) did not meaningfully involve or reflect the voices of everyday Tibetans.
These are not incidental protests: they emerge from deep roots—religion, local culture, sacred geography, and livelihoods.
7. Tsongon Tsering and Other Detained Tibetan Activists
- Tsongon Tsering is a Tibetan environmental activist detained for exposing damage from mining and questioning illegal projects.
- Among the people detained over time, many have faced long periods without legal recourse, sometimes ill‑treatment.
- Their case is emblematic of the conflict: speaking out against projects seen by many locals as destructive often leads to repression.
Illegal Dams, Suppressed Dissent, Unconsulted Communities
The term “illegal” here refers to projects built or advanced without due process—no environmental impact assessments, no public hearings; displacements without fair compensation; sacred lands ignored; ethnic minority consent missing or coerced.
- Studies and reporting have shown that many hydropower projects in Tibet since 2000 have proceeded despite concerns over human rights and environment.
- In several cases, protestors, journalists, farmers are arrested, intimidated, silenced. The weariness of communities runs deep: even when laws may exist for consultation or resettlement, in practice, enforcement is weak.
The Cost: Biodiversity, Culture, and Spiritual Landscape
China’s rivers are more than water: they are home ecosystems, spiritual pathways for indigenous and ethnic minority peoples (Tibetans, Naxi, others), living landscapes with rare plants and animals. When dams flood valleys or redirect rivers, entire ways of life may be lost.
For example, the Tiger Leaping Gorge region includes minority groups whose villages would have been drowned; the campaign to stop the dam saved not only homes but also biodiversity and the cultural memory of the Naxi and others.
Green Tech with a Human Soul: What Is Being Asked
These unheard voices ask not for the end of renewable energy, but for a more humane, responsible model:
- Transparency: Full disclosure of environmental impact assessments; real participation by local communities in decision making.
- Fair Resettlement and Compensation: Those displaced should be restored—not just financially but socially, culturally.
- Protection of Minority Communities: Respect for traditional lands, sacred sites, and cultural ties.
- Downstream Rights and Shared Data: When rivers flow across/through borders, downstream communities must have predictable flows and be included in management.
- Strong Monitoring and Legal Enforcement: Laws matter only if there is accountability; projects must be held to standards and evaluated both before and after.
Traditions, Ancient Wisdom, and Modern Values
From a Tibetan Buddhist scholar’s viewpoint, the rivers, mountains, sacred sites are not merely resources—they are part of the spiritual fabric. In traditional outlooks, nature is not a set of inputs to be harnessed but a teacher, a living community. When dams drown sacred mountains, divert rivers, the loss isn’t only material—it is spiritual, ancestral.
Respecting tradition means listening to elders in villages, to monks, to indigenous knowledge about floods, soils, seasons. It means treating the land as something owed care, not as something conquered.
Conclusion: Light in the Shadows
China’s green‐tech ambitions—if tempered with justice, humility, and listening—can bring real good: clean energy, rural development, flood control. But many times, the cost has been hidden, in the voices displaced, in species lost, in spiritual grief.
The unheard voices—farmers, minority communities, local environmentalists, journalists—are trying to remind us: real sustainability cannot be built on silence. True green progress must include the stories of those who see their valleys drown, their culture submerged, their rights ignored.
