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Natural disasters have long been agents of social and political change in China, and droughts especially so. In part, it was the control of droughts and floods along China’s Yangtze River — Asia’s longest — that inspired the construction of the Three Gorges Dam, the 2,500-meter-long superstructure that stands as a symbol of the Communist Party’s careful, successful stewardship of China’s economy over the last 30 years.

It has long been an object of controversy in China, but its pedigree — it was a pet project of Deng Xiaoping, the architect of China’s modern economy — made it a mostly off-limits subject for criticism.

That all changed this month when China’s State Council announced that there were “urgent problems” with the dam, including issues with pollution and the relocation of populations displaced by the project. And with one week’s hindsight, it also appears that the State Council was aware of a more immediate, looming problem, as well: The Yangtze is now experiencing its worst drought in 50 years, and Chinese voices — both powerful and common — are starting to question the sacrosanct pile of concrete that now dams it. Even the People’s Daily, the official voice of the Party, got in on the act (albeit via quotes on the news pages).

Among China’s millions of microbloggers, few of whom appear to be climate scientists, there’s a wide range of opinion on whether or not the dam is the cause of the drought. One opinion that’s been resurrected in the midst of the dam debate is its supposed role in triggering 2008’s devastating Wenchuan earthquake – and that quake had some connection to a previous drought. Journalist Zhao Shilong, opining on the Sina microblog, joined other microbloggers in making this explicit connection: “Three years after the southwest drought, the ... Wenchuan Earthquake occurred. This year there is a drought in the middle and lower reaches of Yangtze River ... It is very strange!”

For the most part, China’s newspaper editors are increasingly willing to air the negative views of Three Gorges experts. In one of the more dramatic if not comical examples, the popular, nationalist Global Times ran an interview with Fan Xiao, an engineer associated with geological survey teams based near the dam. Unprompted, he offered this unreassuring gem: “After the construction of the project, there were thousands of minor earthquakes, which actually helped release built-up seismic energy in that area and reduced the possibility of big earthquakes happening in the future.”

Partly in response to statements like this, and in part out of the grandiose paranoia that characterizes microbloggers worldwide, many Chinese have taken to proclamations such as the comparison made between the dam and a toilet, by media commentator Li Chengping: “When they feel comfortable, they will flush; but when they are not in the mood, they will hold out.”

Meanwhile, in the absence of hard (public) evidence that the dam caused the increasingly serious drought, the state media is on a bit of an offensive. On Wednesday, Xinhua, the state-owned news service, was peddling a story headlined (on its English site): “No evidence that dam causes drought: experts.” And on Thursday the campaign culminated with a new headline: “Three gorges help fight drought.”

In any case, early in the week, and in some quarters, the conversation had expanded into an ostensibly more answerable — and far more sensitive — question: how on earth did the Three Gorges Dam get approved in the first place? An unsigned editorial in the Western China City Daily, a large-circulation paper based in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, far from Beijing, noted tartly: “Originally, the project was promoted by the government, investigated by a group of experts, and voted on by the National People’s Congress. Common people, even some experts, could hardly get the opportunity to participate in the process. But the construction of the project swallowed up both the inside and the outside of the reservoir and its adverse effects have also spread through different kinds of channels. Finally, we’re all involved.”

This is the sort of opinion that can — or, at least, is — aired far away from Beijing. But back in the capital, where debate is allowed within limits, there’s much less doubt about the wisdom of those who dreamed up, authorized and implemented the dam project. At the Beijing-based Global Times, the dam’s review process was depicted in more approving terms: “Prior to construction, the project had undergone more than 20 years of feasibility studies. Contradictory opinions, mainly from environmentalists, were heard publicly. The final approval was given by the National People’s Congress. Controversy indeed surrounded the Three Gorges Dam from the beginning, but this was not a decision taken on a whim.”

If drought wasn’t reason enough for the Party to become defensive, there is also the uncomfortable precedent of the Sanmen Dam, a social, ecological and environmental disaster that began in the 1950s and continues today. Indeed, the Sanmen Dam remains so sensitive that an investigative journalist who had uncovered much of the incompetence and wrongdoing surrounding that project was briefly arrested in 2010.

Meanwhile, the drought worsens, bringing threats to Shanghai’s water supply, lost rice crops and power rationing across China. Some of China’s microbloggers, unable to do much about the disaster, are taking solace in their ability to talk about it (mostly) openly. “The most commonly heard sentence is: ‘it has no connection with the Three Gorges Project,’ ” wrote a microblogger named Xu Xingqi. “From saying this sentence to laying some of the disadvantages of this project on the public media platform, is indeed progress.”

Bloomberg

Adam Minter is an American writer based in Shanghai.