![]() ![]() In China the reform era had begun in 1978, but it wasn’t until the mid-1990s that free market ideas started to have a major impact on smaller cities like Fuling. It was scheduled for completion in 2009, which seemed an eternity in a place where so much was already happening. Most people strongly supported the dam, although they didn’t talk about it much. Back then the population was around 200,000, which was small by Chinese standards. I lived in Fuling from 1996 to 1998, when I was a Peace Corps volunteer at the local college. The last time I saw Huang, this was all dry land, and the $34 million museum didn’t exist, and the Three Gorges Dam was still under construction 280 miles downstream. The ringtone is a woman’s voice that urgently repeats the phrase “Jia you-go, go, go, go, go!” “This is the most expensive museum in the Three Gorges region,” Huang says, answering his phone again. The museum is the strangest sight in the city of Fuling-visitors enter via a 300-foot-long escalator encased in a steel tube, like a massive straw dipped into the muddy Yangtze. He’s the director of the new White Crane Ridge Underwater Museum, and today his phone rings constantly at a depth of 130 feet. There is excellent cell phone coverage at the bottom of the Yangtze River, although Huang Dejian is one of the few people who know this. This story appears in the March 2013 issue of National Geographic magazine. ![]()
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