Li Jingwen, a member of the Chinese Communist Party’s Academy of Engineering who was accused of being a “Sovietist”, died in Beijing on March 31 at the age of 89 after a long illness. (Photo source: video screenshot)
Li Jingwen, an economist and management scientist who was accused of being a “Sovietist”, died in Beijing on March 31 at the age of 89 after a long illness. During his lifetime, he presided over the economic demonstration of the Three Gorges Project, which he called a “democratic and scientific decision”. But the Three Gorges Project, which was promoted by Jiang Zemin, has long been mired in controversy over various issues.
According to the official Chinese media Guangming Daily, Li Jingwen has presided over the technical and economic validation of the Three Gorges Project, the South-North Water Diversion Project, the Beijing-Shanghai High Speed Railway and other mega-projects, and participated in the formulation of economic development strategies and plans for the Bohai Sea Economic Circle, the five central provinces, Hainan and Shenzhen.
He was appointed as an academician in charge of the economic demonstration of the Three Gorges Project and supported its construction.
The Three Gorges Project is a political project and a problematic project, which was hard-wired by Jiang Zemin and Li Peng because it was too controversial and problems popped up from time to time. The “acceptance”.
On November 1 last year, the Ministry of Water Resources and the National Development and Reform Commission suddenly announced that the Three Gorges Project had recently completed all procedures for overall completion and acceptance. Officials quietly passed the acceptance of the highly controversial project.
According to Radio Free Asia, in 1986, the Chinese government organized a three-year feasibility study of the Three Gorges Project by 412 experts, and only nine experts, including Lu Qinkan, Fang Zongtai, Hou Xueyu, and Guo Laixi, refused to sign off on the project. Li Jingwen, then deputy head of the comprehensive economic evaluation team for the Three Gorges Project, concluded that “it is better to build the Three Gorges Project than not to build it, and it is more beneficial to build it earlier than later.”
Lu Qinkan lost his membership in the CPPCC for opposing the Three Gorges Dam, and journalist Dai Qing was thrown into Qincheng prison for documenting historical facts. Li Jingwen, on the other hand, was elected to the Chinese Academy of Engineering in 2001.
However, despite the ongoing problems with the Three Gorges project, Li Jingwen was so proud of the demonstration after two decades that he called it “a model of democratic and scientific decision-making” that the South-North Water Transfer and Beijing-Shanghai High Speed Rail projects he later participated in were modeled after the Three Gorges.
Wang Weiluo, a long-time expert on the Three Gorges, recalls that more than 20 people, including Li Jingwen, signed the Three Gorges project and became engineering academics. None of those who refused to sign became academicians, so much so that later intellectuals learned the hard way and there was little opposition to the South-North Water Transfer Project.
Wang Weiluo told Radio Free Asia, “The signatures will be kept forever, and the results of the argument will be responsible to history and will stand the test of history, and we all cherish our names and do not want to be sinners in history.”
Li Jingwen mentioned that 185 billion yuan was spent on the Three Gorges project at the time of settlement, which basically matched his prediction. Wang Weiluo, on the other hand, argued that Li Jingwen would have had a chance to stop the Three Gorges Project from going ahead if he had spelled out the cost of 190.89 billion yuan in his general report, but he reported 37.1 billion yuan (called the static investment amount, which was changed to 57 billion yuan by the time the National People’s Congress made its decision in 1992).
Wang Weiluo said, “By saying in 1992, ‘I counted 1900 billion yuan,’ Li Jingwen was considered a truth-telling scientist. What’s the use of waiting 22 years later to say that his calculations are accurate? Li Jingwen, who knew full well that Li Peng and Zou Jiahua had lied when they made their report, only announced 57 billion yuan to the Chinese people.”
The scientific nature of the Three Gorges Project decision has been controversial. Wang Weiluo’s research shows that 14 professional groups, including sediment, flood control, environment and immigration, worked in closed groups and talked about themselves back then. “Li Jingwen couldn’t bother with immigration or the ecological environment. Each group is arguing for itself, and the argumentative reports of 14 groups put together are contradictory.”
“The biggest side effect is the damage to the ecology and the social shock. The scary thing is that no one dares to speak out against it anymore.” Wang Weiluo sighed.
Li Nanyang, the daughter of Li Rui, who strongly opposes the Three Gorges Project, also said that if the data made out is right and the Three Gorges vote does not come out to speak, “then it is not a scientist, but a learned official, as a career ladder. After the Communist Party came to power, real scientists, like Huang Wanli, were beaten as class enemies and never allowed to turn over. The South-North Water Transfer is a battle with the sky, destroying the natural properties of the river, like pumping human blood. But these experts knew that they were no longer alive when the evils appeared.”
Scholars of the “Soviet faction” are afraid to speak the truth: “Follow the Party” is more important than anything else
Born into an underground family, Li Jingwen entered the economics department of Wuhan University in 1951 and joined the Chinese Communist Party. Before and after the Cultural Revolution, Li worked mainly at the grassroots level of the Planning Commission and at the Beijing Institute of Economics, where he remained dormant for many years until 1985, when he was appointed the first director of the Institute of Quantitative and Technical Economics.
More than ten years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Li Jingwen claimed in a public speech that Chinese people should also have the beliefs of the new era, such as the “Three Represents”. The “Three Represents” were designed for Jiang Zemin by the imperial literati.
It is noteworthy that geographer Guo Laixi, who also stayed in the Soviet Union in the 1950s, changed from an active promoter to an opponent because of the livelihood of millions of migrants to the Three Gorges.
Wang Weiluo regrets that Li Jingwen had the opportunity to become a “truth-telling scientist” like Guo Laixi, but he chose to follow the party’s “one heart” and the political mission of the Soviet scholars transcended everything else.
Wang Weiluo said, “A large group of people who stayed in the Soviet Union were second-generation Reds, or children from poor backgrounds. Politically, the Communist Party considered them very reliable. This group of foreign students from the Soviet Union was a disaster for China; look at Jiang Zemin, Li Peng, and Li Lanqing. Academia also formed gangs, not with science and freedom as the highest norm, science for the proletariat, a tool of politics. They think that Soviet plus electrification is the same as communism.”
Li Jingwen’s involvement in the “South-North Water Diversion” project is also said to be a problematic project
Another project with more serious potential problems than the Three Gorges Project is the South-North Water Transfer Project, which was launched in 2002 by Jiang Zemin and in which Li Jingwen was involved.
The unprecedented and world-renowned China’s “South-North Water Transfer” project, the first phase of the Eastern and Central Routes, has cost about 250 billion yuan so far, and will cost 500 billion yuan in total, plus follow-up works and maintenance and operation costs. The Eastern Line was declared open to water at the end of 2013, and the Central Line will be officially opened to water on December 10, 2019.
But strangely enough, there is little coverage of the completion of the South-North Water Transfer project in the official Chinese media, which seems to be a deliberate attempt to avoid difficult words. The key decision makers, builders, those in charge and those in charge of the project have not been seen to claim credit.
Some netizens have written an article denouncing the whole “South-North Water Transfer” project decision and implementation as a decision of the buttocks to the brain, disregarding the minimum natural and scientific principles, which will certainly fail. Now, according to reports from all sides, not only the East and Central lines are failed projects, but also a disastrous failure, a complete failure, unable to account for, unable to close.
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