UP THE YANGTZE HDTV

Originally aired: 2008.10.08

"Everything in booming, Olympic-hosting China comes huge — especially the Three Gorges Dam. Imagining the Colorado River dammed up and the Grand Canyon turned into a vast lake might give you an idea of the physical scale of the project. It might even give you a sense of what it would feel like to see one of your country's iconic landscapes being drowned in the name of progress. But, as revealed in Up the Yangtze, the new documentary airing on P.O.V., such an imaginative exercise would hardly capture the scale of social and economic dislocation caused by the dam, especially for the peasants who have farmed the Yangtze River Valley for millennia. Nor would it capture the hope for a strong, prosperous China that Three Gorges represents for many other Chinese.

Up the Yangtze is an epic journey up the river on one of the luxury cruise ships that feed the hunger of tourists to have a last look at the legendary valley, where even the mythical "Gates of Hell" at the Ghost City of Fengdu soon will be inundated. By focusing on the fortunes of two young people who work on the same ship — one a poor peasant girl and the other an urban, middle-class boy — the film reveals the river to be a symbol of the new China, where an ancient way of life disappears underwater as metropolises of mind-bending size spring up along the new shores. And where the common folk of old China are left to fend for themselves in a world being remade, literally, under their feet."