Movie Review - 'Up the Yangtze'

Up the Yangtze

Directed by Yung Chang
Not Rated

The Yangtze River in China is one of the cradles of all civilization. There is evidence of mankind in the region dating back over 25,000 years, although a lot of that is about to become submerged.

Earlier this decade, China open the Three Gorges Dam, which the government there believes will be an economic boom, and which many outsiders believe is corrupt at some level.

What the government does not want to hear is all this talk about how the damn - the largest hydroelectric plant in the world - is not only wiping the archaeological record clean in one of the most important ancient cultures on Earth, but also how it's wiping out its current residents, too. Many Chinese villages are being flooded by the operation of the damn, and its residents are being forced out with no assistance from the government. A lot of families have moved into areas that later get flooded themselves, forcing the now-nomadic farmers and craftsmen to move yet again.

Up the Yangtze puts this bizarre and incredibly inhuman pursuit of the dollar under a microscope by filming a trip along the river on one of the many cruise ships that has popped up in this region of China in the past few years. You know how we have rubberneckers in the U.S. and we have people who drive through tornado-stricken towns to observe the damage? These cruises are all about watching villages prepare to die. It's incredibly sad, really, that this has become something of a cottage industry.

On the other hand, the Yangtze has flooded plenty of times; in 1954, floods killed over 33,000 people, covered the city of Wuhan with water for over three months, and relocated 18 million people. So it's a difficult thing to balance, of course.

What's most interesting in all of this is the distinction made by Up the Yangtze between a "modern" China that is pushing itself forward and the agrarian Chinese the progress is squashing. Up the Yangtze captures a country that's frankly just too massive; bringing all of these villagers into the 21st Century would require bringing them into the 20th Century first. I don't have any good answers for it, and it's clear the Chinese government doesn't, either.

But the cruise ships, that degradingly promote seeing a way of life that no longer exists while it still exists, can't be the best option.