The Son of Jinsha River and the fate of Tiger Leaping Gorge
A young ethnographer gave his life twenty years ago to the campaign against damming one of the most beautiful canyons in the world. Now the hydropower project has revived.
Friday 28th of March 2025
In recent months, several events have been held to commemorate Xiao Liangzhong, the ethnographer who passed away in 2005 at the height of the campaign against the Tiger Leaping Gorge Dam. He was only 32 years old. These events featured the screening of a new documentary about the young scholar, who is fondly remembered as the Son of Jinsha River. Before his untimely death, he was tirelessly writing articles, organizing seminars, coordinating dialogues, and conducting interviews to draw attention to the hydropower project threatening to submerge significant portions of the fertile riverside land near the region that is globally known as Shangri-La. It is where Xiao’s home village Chezhu is located. A community of various ethnic minority groups have inhabited there for millennia.
I briefly mentioned Xiao and his work in my book, primarily as a backdrop to the main story of the fight against the Nu River dams. In fact, the campaign to save the Tiger Leaping Gorge on the upper stream of the Jinsha River ran almost parallel to the Nu River mobilization and was equally influential. Due to the cross-pollination among activists involved in both campaigns, the fates of the two rivers were intertwined.
Xiao left an indelible mark on the movement despite his early passing. He made a concerted effort to transcend the anti-dam campaign’s narrow environmental focus by introducing cultural arguments into the debate. His approach was distinct from the rights-based advocacy practiced by civil society leaders like Yu Xiaogang (featured in the book). As Wang Hui, the torch bearer of China’s intellectual “New Left,” noted in his commemorative piece for Xiao, the emphasis on indigenous cultural customs and practices—many of which are communal rather than individualistic—is fundamental to a genuine resistance against the developmentalist destruction of both nature and society. Wang Hui elaborated on this idea a decade after Xiao’s passing, stating:
“If we only put ecological and developmental issues in the realm of individual rights, then it brings us back to contractual relations and individualistic culture, which is exactly the logic of developmentalism… The cultures of many indigenous communities that face threats to their living environment are tied to their communal way of life. In such cases, the more you defend individualistic rights, the more you are actually destroying their culture.”
What Xiao accomplished as an ethnographer was the meticulous documentation of the transformation of life in Chezhu. An ethnic Bai himself, Xiao’s ancestors moved into this small village on the bank of the Jinsha River after the dusts had settled for a multi-century struggle among the local Naxi people, the Tibetans, the Hans, and the Mongols. This struggle culminated in the 18th century when Qing Emperor Yongzheng finally brought the region under imperial rule. This relatively new frontier of the empire preserves a rich tapestry of cultural heritages resulting from this ethnic entanglement.
In his 2004 book, Xiao uncovered the relics of this cultural melting pot in Southwestern China. He surveyed 17,000-year-old rock paintings, excavated 8th-century Tibetan tablets, visited the ruins of Buddhist temples, and interviewed elders of Naxi, Pumi, and Bai heritages. He described how the Naxi’s unique place-based naming system defined their identity; family names did not follow bloodline but were attached to the household’s location in relation to village landmarks. New families moving to the area would adopt that name. He traced the gradual adoption of Han traditions by the locals as the empire projected its power to this remote corner through new institutions and economic influence. It was a negotiated process of cultural merger: for a significant part of the community’s history, locals owned the best quality land by the river, while newcomers navigated their way up through marriages and entrepreneurship. This long process has shaped the diverse yet internally coherent community of Chezhu today.
In retrospect, this piece of academic work laid an important foundation for the community’s fight against dam building starting in 2004. Although Xiao recognized the inevitability of his hometown’s evolution and change (he deconstructed the notion of “native” through his documentation of a long history of migration, cultural clashes, and even wars), he valued the internal congruence of a highly diverse community, and it was its disintegration that worried him the most. At the end of the book, he noted how the market economy was beginning to tear through the village. People were leaving their agrarian lives en masse for the urban labor market, as agriculture was arbitrarily underpriced to subsidize the booming industrial sector.
For those concerned about the community’s future, the hydropower station will only hasten the disintegration through forced relocation and changes in livelihood. This will be detrimental not only to the villagers affected but also to the broader region. As ethnic strife became a significant issue in China’s Tibetan regions in the early 2000s, the relatively harmonious inter-ethnic relationships in Northern Yunnan, maintained partly through the internal coherence documented by Xiao, were viewed as an essential stabilizing factor politically. This stability contributed to the top-level decision to veto the dam-building proposal twenty years ago.
In September 2024, however, a notification issued by the Yunnan Provincial government effectively froze all new developments around Tiger Leaping Gorge in anticipation of future inundation. The dam project had officially been revived. Chezhu is among the long list of villages that will be affected. Residential buildings, agricultural land, and other fixed assets that existed before the cut-off date will be compensated as the project moves forward. 110,000 people will face eviction to higher altitude townships more than 100 kilometers to the north.
What is utterly ironic about the current situation is that in 2006, the local government’s decision to lift the moratorium on construction in the same area signaled the abandonment of the hydropower project. Since then, the valleys have become a strategic agricultural production zone for the province. Major investments were poured into the Shangri-la Industrial Park, which itself now faces submersion, along with the world-class tourism assets of Tiger Leaping Gorge.
The resumption of the project is one of the most shocking reversals in China’s recent environmental history, reminding us that nothing is truly set in stone when it comes to political decisions affecting highly lucrative development projects. It also underscores that even in the era of Ecological Civilization, the formidable provincial growth machine remains active in significant ways. Compared to twenty years ago, several factors have changed. The conservation coalition, which included Xiao and other activists, that mobilized against dam construction has been significantly weakened in recent years due to tighter political controls, as documented in my book.
Economic slowdown over the past few years has led provincial governments to scramble for “growth stabilizing” projects to bolster collapsing fiscal revenues. One reliable tactic has been to revisit old project proposals that can be reconsidered without the need for extensive groundwork required for new ideas. The resurgence of dormant projects has been a recurrent theme in recent years, with another high-profile example being the controversial Poyang Lake sluice gate project.
The rise of green ideology was expected to moderate the high-impact growth model. However, in contrast to the political atmosphere surrounding large hydro projects at the beginning of the century (when the World Commission on Dam’s report globally problematized them), the concept has been significantly depoliticized in the new reality of post-Paris Agreement decarbonization. In China, large hydro projects have firmly entrenched themselves in the country’s renewable-centered energy strategy: hydro dams with vast reservoirs are now considered essential regulatory components to intermittent solar and wind power deployed at scale. Enormous clean energy “bundles” that include solar, wind, and hydro are now planned across China’s southwest.
“The Jinsha under the twilight sun is deep and tranquil, like a line of elegy,” Xiao Liangzhong wrote of his mother river in his book. On a small hill overlooking the Jinsha River now stands his tomb. The villagers buried him there so that he could eternally watch the river flow freely, as he had dreamed. Since his passing in 2005, fellow activists have visited the tomb to pay tribute to the Son of Jinsha.
The significance of this site will soon change drastically if the entire area is under water. However, the communities along the river are not passively accepting this turn of events; resentment toward the dam still runs deep, especially after many have invested in a life based on the assumption that dam-building was a thing of the past. As recently as June of last year, riverside villagers attempted to organize a petition against the dam. Authorities intervened before the signed letter could be distributed. For the people of Tiger Leaping Gorge, nothing is set in stone yet.
Green Citizens Political Economy
Dear Ma Laoshi,
Do you have a link to the new documentary on Xiao Liangzhong? Or could you give me the title in Chinese and the director. Thanks, Professor Ralph Litzinger, Duke Univeristy. Wechat: rlitz721