Bosshard said that three people he met on a visit to Beijing this week separately predicted that the Chinese government would reconsider its aggressive dam-building programme. It is too late to stop China’s notorious Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest hydroelectric power project, at a cost of $30 billion and more than 1 million people displaced. But environmentalists are likely to fight another controversial dam planned for the Nu River in a quake-prone location near the border with Myanmar.

Also, within days of the magnitude-7.9 quake on May 12, PetroChina announced it would reconsider its plans for a $5.5 billion refinery and petrochemical plant in Pengzhou, 30 miles from the epicentre.

Sichuan province’s environmentalists have been fighting dams for years. In 2003, they stopped a project that was to be built in Dujiangyan on the grounds it would destroy a 2,000-year-old irrigation system that is a World Heritage Site. But they could not block the Zipingpu Dam, which opened two years ago over the objections of the Sichuan Seismological Bureau. Zipingpu sustained severe cracks on May 12 even though it was built to the highest quake-resistant standards.

Dams are something of an obsession for the burgeoning Chinese environmental movement. They are at once the most vivid example of Mao’s call to reshape nature and a symbol of greed in the market economy. Many of the dams built in the last decade are to satisfy the nation’s hunger for hydroelectric power and to generate revenue for local government.

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