Posted on 02/18/2019 9:23:42 AM PST by EveningStar
... According to an account of the Banqiao Dam by a Chinese journalist writing under the pseudonym Yi Si, on Aug. 8, as workers stared curiously at the retreating water level of the reservoir, a voice in the dark called out: “The River Dragon has come!” And suddenly the dam ruptured, unleashing 600 billion liters of water and destroying an entire village. By Aug. 17, reports Si, 1.1 million people remained trapped by flooding with 50 to 60 percent of food air-dropped into the area floating in the murky waters. It would take weeks for the waters to drain, revealing bloated corpses dotting the landscape in the late summer sun.
The government kept news of the disaster from being broadcast nationally, and there hadn’t been any international observers present. But when China’s Ministry of Water Resources and Electric Power released a study in July 1989, it reported that the dam breach caused more than 85,000 people to die instantly. Two years earlier, “On Macro-Decision Making in the Three Gorges Project,” a study conducted by eight Chinese water science experts who probably had access to censored government reports, estimated the number of total dead — from flooding and the resulting epidemics and famine — at 230,000...
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
ping
Was it on purpose?
I don’t know but I doubt it.
1975
... making way for glorious new tractor factory!
I always keep this kind of thing in mind when looking at estimates of innocent people murdered by the Chinese government during “The Great Leap Forward”.
Low estimates (usually given by those sympathetic to the Communist government) is around 40 million innocent souls murdered.
High estimates I have seen are 150 million.
Given the disparity here between 85K and 230K, well...you get the idea.
Good to keep in mind who the Chinese government really is.
My dad told the story of one of Mao’s “leap forward” projects.
It seems Mao noticed song birds nibbling spilled grain in the fields and concluded the birds were a threat to the Chinese. He ordered that all such birds be killed to leave more grain for farmers to collect.
The birds were destoyed in great numbers, resulting in massive insect damage to the same crops the following year.
Genius !
As Chinese peasants say - they are no better than ants in the eyes of their nation and government.
Everyone thinks good engineering is expensive.
Bad engineering is even more expensive...
This is the inevitable result of giving the government control over the environment.
Before the Iron Curtain fell, environmentalists focused on actual pollution - chemicals not found in nature that make people sick when they are dumped in the air, land or water. The only solution was more government control and higher taxes!
Then the Iron Curtain fell and most of the Eastern European countries were shown to be environmental cesspools. Communist and socialist countries have terrible environmental records when compared to capitalist countries, because people take much better care of their own private property than the government does when it controls all of the property.
So the environmentalist left shifted their focus from actual pollution to carbon dioxide, a trace gas that is not only found in nature but is essential to the continued existence of all life on Earth. Why carbon dioxide? Because capitalist countries, being more successful and providing a much higher quality of life, produce more carbon dioxide per capita than communist and socialist countries, which barely produce anything. The only solution is still more government control and higher taxes.
What’s a million Chinese?
Yet another entry in the Annals of Government Transparency.
It Pelosi over a year to make that change.
In a one-world government, such tragedies would never be reported by anyone.
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