Lu Xun's "New Story": Criticizing Chinese Civilization(The Problems of the Dam): Essay

Three Gorges Dam

The collection of works in the title is a wonderful response between the artist himself and his works, as Lu Xun(魯迅), who was concerned about the future of China, was trying to sound a warning to the Chinese people. Although he was fully aware of the greatness of Chinese civilization, he wrote things that disparaged that civilization. The works included are 8 stories in total, including a ``reasonable new interpretation'' of Lao Tzu’s Departing episode, and are rich in variety, so you won't get tired of reading them.

The most interesting story among these stories is that when King Yu(禹), one of the three emperors Yao, Shun, and Yu, was desperately trying to control floods, scholars and officials connected to the central government What this means is seen as nothing more than an event in the world of Chinese characters, and the story depicts people having meaningless discussions about whether Yu actually meant an insect, and doing nothing about the problem. Eventually, the mud-covered Yus returned and despised and mocked those in the center.

Importantly, Yu succeeded in controlling floods by letting water flow without building dams. Modern China's Three Gorges Dam is only a recipe for disaster. Suicidal behavior of the Chinese people. They must read the classics properly. (Here,” The book:書経”)

Lu Xun's internal motivation for writing this story was that at the time, the system for discovering officials called the Imperial Examination had become meaningless, and the story of how a student taking the Imperial Examination who could only understand Chinese characters was now meaningless to even children. It seems that Lu Xun, who witnessed the pitiful situation where he gave a lecture on Chinese characters, wrote out his anger (though he did not know whom he was addressing) on a manuscript paper. In the case of Yu's tales, without making fun of the main character, he depicts a highly probable figure of Yu and instead criticizes Chinese civilization by pointing out the scholars and officials who have become a group of incompetents bound by Chinese characters.

魯迅の『故事新編』：中国文明をこき下ろす

表題の作品集は、中国の行く末を憂いた魯迅(ろじん)が、中国人への警鐘を鳴らす意味で、作家自身と作品が見事に呼応したものです。中国文明の素晴らしさを十分知った上で、その文明を貶めることを書くのです。収録されている作品は、老子出関の逸話の「妥当な新解釈」のお話などなど、全８話、ヴァラエティに富んでいて、読んでいて飽きません。

これらのお話のなかでも興味深いのは、堯・舜・禹（三帝）のひとり禹（う）王が、必死に治水の事業をしていた際に、中央政府に繋がる学者・役人たちが禹とはなにか、漢字の世界の出来事としてしか見られず、禹とは虫のことだったかなどと無意味な議論をしていて、なにもしない有様が描かれます。そのうち、泥まみれの禹たちが帰還し、彼ら中央のものどもを軽蔑しあざ笑う・・・こんな話でした。ちなみに、Yu、ダムを作らず、水を流すことで、治水に成功した。現代中国の三峡ダムは、災害を招くだけだ。中国民族の自殺行為。彼らは古典はちゃんと読まなくてはだめだ。

魯迅がこの話を書いた内的動機としては、当時、科挙という役人発掘制度が無意味になり、漢字のことしかよく解らぬ科挙受験生のなれの果てが、子供たちに、いまや無意味になった漢字の講釈を垂れるという情けない実情を目にした魯迅が「憤り」（だれに対してかは解らぬながら）を原稿用紙に書きつづった有様が目のあたりに見えるようです。禹の説話の場合、主人公を茶化さずに有り得た蓋然性の高い禹の姿を書ききり、むしろ漢字に縛られ、無能集団と化した学者や役人を槍玉に挙げることによって、中国文明の批判にしたのでしょう。

asking the real questions in biology class: could a thousand beavers build the three gorges dam

Three Gorges Dam was completed in 2003 and is presently the world’s largest hydropower dam. The project began in 1994 when China was looking for a cleaner and more effective way to create energy to meet the demands of the country’s rapidly growing population as well as the advancement of technology.

China’s Three Gorges Dam is among the world’s most ambitious and contentious undertakings. This dam also served another crucial purpose. Because of the Yangtze River’s size, the locals were subjected to floods, particularly during the rainy season, affecting millions of people. The dam was designed to improve the quality of life for the inhabitants of Hubei Province, but it actually made matters worse and retarded the earth’s rotation.

Let’s take a look at 10 interesting facts about Three Gorges Dam and how it makes the earth rotate SLOW.

2002 China, Yangtze, Three Gorges

“not only can the great wall of china not be seen from space, NO manmade object can be seen from space” well what about. international space station. bet you feel real stupid now

Updates on Sauk-Suiattle Tribe and the Skagit River: The owner of the three major dams on the Skagit, Seattle City Light, is currently petitioning the US federal government and moving to extend its operation of these dams for the next 30 to 50 years. This re-licensing would allow Seattle City Light to continue operating for decades in the future, just as they have, without protecting salmon, basically. Almost every other dam in the Pacific Northwest has installed “fish passage infrastructure” which allows migrating salmon and other species to continue traveling along the river course. However, Seattle City Light has not installed the fish passage infrastructure on the Skagit. The Sauk-Suiattle Tribe has repeatedly asked for this installation. So the Sauk-Suiattle Tribe launched a lawsuit against the city of Seattle, with the tribe saying that Seattle is deliberately turning public opinion against Indigenous people while also “greenwashing” its reputation by promoting the city and its dams as “green.”

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The water sustains life here, in spawning grounds and rearing habitat for native salmon and steelhead. But some 20 miles upstream, the Skagit is quiet. It’s been replaced by the soft crackle and hum of high-tension power lines carrying one-fifth of Seattle’s electricity generated by three century-old dams. Almost 40% of the river is locked up for cheap [...] hydropower. Now, as a fight over the river’s future simmers, a question about the value of life itself is being revisited: Does this river have inherent civil rights?

Seattle City Light is moving to extend its use of the dams for another three to five decades, and tribes and other environmental groups have been pushing the utility to do more for salmon.

The Sauk-Suiattle Tribe, one of the smallest and poorest in the region, and its one-person legal team asked its own courts to recognize the rights of the salmon. A tribal court struck down the request over jurisdictional concerns, but it brought attention to the way governments, utilities, the legal system and landowners perceive their nonhuman neighbors. [...] The 19-acre Sauk-Suiattle reservation is nestled in the foothills of the North Cascades. It’s bound by mature-growth forests [...] and the Sauk and Suiattle rivers. [...]

“This is where nature is,” said Jack Fiander, a member of the Yakama Nation, and longtime legal counsel for the Sauk-Suiattle tribe. “Where we’re at is sort of like the Amazon is to South America. We’ve got to constantly watch and comment on when somebody wants to harvest timber or something, and it’s getting more and more difficult to protect it.”

When the dams went in the Skagit River, there was no consultation with the people who lived there for generations — the ancestors of the modern day Upper Skagit, Swinomish and Sauk-Suiattle tribes and Canadian First Nations, Fiander said.

And the tribes didn’t have the resources then to fight for fish passage.

As the city’s latest re-licensing process ramped up, the Upper Skagit tribe asked for fish passage at the Gorge Dam, the lowest of the three. The Sauk-Suiattle Tribe challenged the electric utility’s “green” power claims, and asked for salmon to have an equal shot at life in the Skagit and its tributaries.

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Headline, photos, captions, and text published by: Isabella Breda. “’Rights of nature’ movement gains steam in Pacific Northwest. Can it help species on the brink?” Seattle Times. 11 February 2023. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks added by me.]

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The Washington State Court of Appeals gave the green light for the Sauk-Suiattle Indian Tribe to proceed in its “greenwashing” litigation against the City of Seattle. In September 2021, the Tribe, based in Darrington, filed a lawsuit against the city, alleging City Light’s claims that it’s the “Nation’s Greenest Utility,” and that its hydro-electric operations on the Skagit River have improved conditions for salmon are misleading and harmful to the tribe. The Tribe said the city couldn’t claim its dams are green because they lack fish passage, like nearly every other dam in the Pacific Northwest. [...]

In the original complaint, the Tribe alleged when Seattle took credit for improving conditions for salmon species on the Skagit, it “wrongfully shifted blame” for dwindling fish populations from the city’s dam operations to the tribes. The “public misperception,” wrote the Tribe, makes them a target of “public ire, harassment, and vandalism.” “Seattle has done the worst for salmon while claiming to be the best, meanwhile pointing the finger at everyone else for Skagit salmon decline,” said Jack Fiander, attorney for the Sauk-Suiattle. “Seattle says their greenwashing is harmless puffery, but when you’re turning neighbor against neighbor to improve your corporate bottom line, it is harmful to our community as well as the fisheries resource.”

The legal proceedings come as Seattle City Light is in the process of relicensing its Skagit River dams with the federal government. A new license would last between 30 and 50 years. Negotiations have been underway for four years, with fish passage being the most hotly debated issue. [...]

Last year, the city of Seattle was successful in getting the Sauk-Suiattle’s lawsuit dismissed by a King County Superior Court Judge. [...] Monday’s ruling reverses the dismissal and allows the Sauk-Suiattle Tribe to proceed. The suit seeks to keep Seattle from advertising themselves as being fish-friendly until fish passage is installed over all three dams.

Seattle City Light was the first public utility in the country to earn a green power certification from the Low Impact Hydropower Institute. The Sauk-Suiattle Tribe said the utility used misinformation to gain the green status.

Skagit River Chinook salmon, steelhead and Bull Trout are all listed on the Endangered Species List and are threatened with extinction. [...]

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Headline and text published by: Susannah Frame. “Court of Appeals sides with Sauk-Suiattle Tribe in ‘greenwashing’ case against Seattle City Light.” King 5 News. 6 March 2023. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks added by me.]

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Italicized first paragraph in this post added by me.

Skyfall Power of Three

I'd like some opinions/feedback on my two main ideas for that to do about the Three. In either case, I want there to be 5 powerful cats, one for each clan. Please read the options below before voting! The Poll is at the bottom!

Option #1:

Lion = MothPool, Jay and Holly = LeafCrow, Dove is from SkyClan, Ivy is from ShadowClan.

Lion is adopted by Mothwing as a foundling.

Holly is adopted by Crowfeather as a foundling

Jay remains in ThunderClan and is adopted by Squirrelflight who has just given birth to Juniper and Dandelion. J and D die soon after, leaving just Jay.

Squirrel and Leaf still leave the clan briefly for both to give birth, which is why Jay can be adopted without an suspicion.

Foundlings are the easiest way to hide unlawful relationships/kits in Skyfall WC, so this is not uncommon and the clans don't really bat an eye at it. Even so, the three do not know their parentage and are raised believing themselves to be the kits of the loners or of SquirrelBramble in the case of Jay.

Dovewing is born in SkyClan at the gorge and her powers are what allows them to join the other clans.

Ivypool is born in ShadowClan and is unrelated to the others.

Dove and Ivy are slightly younger than the other three, but not by that much.

Option #2:

Lion = SquirrelBramble. He is the littermate of Juniper and Dandelion. Again, both J and D die young leaving just Lion.

Jay = MothPool. Jay goes to RiverClan and is raised by Mothwing.

Holly = LeafCrow. Holly again goes to WindClan and is raised as Breezepelt's sister.

Jay and Holly are littermates because of the whole 1 dam 2+ sires thing that can happen with cats

Dove is born in SkyClan. her powers allow SkyClan to find the other clans (same as Option 1)

Ivy is born in ShadowClan. This is also the same as Option 1.

Same guidelines apply as option 1 as far as foundlings, etc go.

TLDR:

Option 1: Lion = MothPool, Jay and Holly = LeafCrow, Dove = SkyClan, Ivy = ShadowClan

Option 2: Lion = SquirrelBramble, Jay = MothPool, Holly = LeafCrow, Dove = SkyClan, Ivy = ShadowClan

IN EITHER CASE: Leaf, Squirrel, Moth, and Crow are in on the secret and the kits are all raised in different clans. Dove and Ivy are Sky and Shadow respectively.

Three Gorges Dam(山峡ダム）:verse

It holds 1.6 times the water volume of Lake Biwa, the largest lake in Japan. Do stupid Chinese need such a toy? If this dam is destroyed, 400 million people will disappear. Putin, if you want to break the dam, go this way.

山峡ダム

日本最大の琵琶湖の１．６倍の貯水量。 馬鹿の中国人にこんな玩具が必要なのか？ このダムが破壊されたら、４億人が消滅する。 プーチンよ、ダムを壊すなら、こっちにしろ。

Rei Morishita

Sun Wukong: Erlang Shen isn't talking to me.

Chenxiang: Enjoy it while it lasts.

Sun Wukong: *tears up* But it's so interesting to hear him info-dump about civil engineering, and he looks so cute, when he passionately talks for hours about the importance of considering the dead and life load, when you build a building or bridge, about how the Three Gorges Dam actually sucks-

Chenxiang: Wait, you actually pay attention to that?

Sun Wukong: -and how a decicive factor in the sinking of the Titanic was shitty quality steel-

Chenxiang: Oh crap, my Shifu and my arsehole uncle are both nerds!

the Baiheliang Underwater Museum is a museum located in the Yangtze River. it was built to conserve a historical site that was permanently submerged by the construction of the Three Gorges Dam.

I wanna take an escalator underwater and look at thousand year old carvings 😭

Okay so y'all know that meme that's like

Person A: ARE YOU-

Person B: *cussing*

Person A: -KIDDING ME?!!?!

That meme just summoned a memory to the surface so now it’s storytime! In my 2nd year of college I had the world’s coolest, best geography teacher ever, and I mean that 100% he’s the best college teacher I’ve ever had bar none and the way he taught geography was amAzing, but anyway when we got to China and we were talking about the Three Gorges Dam he designated a guy to say the word “Dam” for him bc he liked to amuse us college kids, it made the information stick better, so as he was lecturing he would be like "The Three Gorges" and then the guy in the front row would say "Dam" and if he didn't say it fast enough he got a Look™ "this" "Dam" "produces a lot of hydroelectricity" like it was so funny had me rolling in my seat

Does Constructing multiple #skyscrapers pose a risk to the Earth's rotation and spinning? The world is rapidly growing more and more populous, and there are also more buildings on the planet. Does this alter the rotation of the Earth? What if the earth stands still? It might come as a surprise to you that some of the Mega-structures like Skyscrapers play a small but significant role in altering the rotation of the Earth. The earth's rotation may actually slow down if the construction is large and tall enough to increase the earth's moment of inertia. While constructing massive skyscrapers, we are raising some mass from the earth's surface to a height above it. This increases the earth's moment of inertia around its axis of rotation.  China's Three Gorges Dam, delayed the rotation of the Earth by 0.06 microseconds  The slowing of the earth’s rotation has been happening ever since the moon started orbiting the Earth. A day was just 18.7 hours long 1.4 billion years ago, in the Neoproterozoic era when the moon was 27,000 miles closer to Earth than it is now.  According to the International Earth Rotation & Reference Systems Service (an organization in charge of global timekeeping), on June 29, 2022, the Earth's regular 24-hour rotation was 1.59 milliseconds quicker than usual, shattering the previous record for the shortest day in recorded history. The previous record was set on July 19, 2020, when the day had a deviation of 1.47 milliseconds from average. What if the earth stands still? The topology of the globe, including both the general shape of the world and the contour of the earth's oceans, is largely influenced by the speed at which the earth rotates. If the earth fully stopped rotating, you would have half a year of daylight and half a year of night-time. The surface temperature would vary according to latitude during the day for six months, being much hotter near the equator than at the poles, where the light rays are more slanted and heating effectiveness is lower.  The atmospheric wind circulation pattern would change as a result of this long-term temperature differential, moving air from the equator to the poles as opposed to the current wind systems that are parallel to the equator. The oceans would inevitably move toward the poles if the globe remained still, creating land in the equatorial region. This would eventually lead to the formation of two sizable polar oceans and a massive equatorial mega continent.  As long as we can envision, the earth's rotation will continue to slow down infinitesimally but steadily for years to come. The cumulative effect of these dynamic changes is that the globe is becoming resembles a sphere, but it will be billions of years before the globe stops spinning. How did the Three Gorges Dam Slow the Earth’s Rotation?

Read the Full Article - https://www.indovance.com/knowledge-center/10-facts-about-three-gorges-dam-that-slowed-the-earths-rotation/

INTERVIEW

Cyrus Cornut, On the Four Shores of Passing Times

Cyrus Cornut, On the Four Shores of Passing Times, Chongqing, People's Republic of China, 2008.

Known as the «Mountain City,» Chongqing sits at the confluence of the Yangtze and Jialang Rivers, its skyline often obscured by the perpetual fog that envelops it. A city of contrasts, Chongqing is both the heir to displaced communities from the Three Gorges dam and a testament to the rapid modernization efforts of the Beijing authorities, who have elevated it to the status of a municipality.

Against this backdrop of relentless development, Cyrus Cornut's lens captures the essence of Chongqing's urban landscape. From the gravity-defying skyscrapers that dot the skyline to the bustling streets teeming with newcomers, each photograph reveals a city in constant motion.

See more here → allcitiesarebeautiful.com

2002 China, Yangtze, Three Gorges

if i had a nickel for every early 21st century mainland chinese film where a group of young adults are sent to a rural town for reeducation during the cultural revolution and they start an innocent romance with one of the locals and later on help facilitate a secret abortion and then years later the whole setting is covered up by the three gorges dam. well then i’d have two nickels