中国政府积极评价三峡工程

China's cabinet defended the controversial Three Gorges Dam, even as officials acknowledged spiraling costs for measures to mitigate its environmental impact and additional resettlements of people originally forced out by the dam.

'We have all along acknowledged the existence of these disadvantages. The problem is how to tackle the disadvantages, and in time, the decisions will prove to be scientific and correct,' said Wang Xiaofeng , director of the office of the Three Gorges Project Committee of the State Council, the top official in charge of the mammoth dam across the Yangtze River.

Mr. Wang's comments came at the highest-level news conference the Chinese government has held on the project since officials, including Mr. Wang, made a stunning admission of the dam's problems earlier this fall.

Mr. Wang said the dam had improved flood control and navigation as well as helped China's environment by reducing reliance on coal.

His upbeat assessment appeared to be an effort to stem rising criticism of the project in the wake of increasing evidence that the dam may actually be harming the environment by contributing to deadly landslides while worsening the livelihoods of those forced to relocate.

Mr. Wang said the government had initially allocated $5.4 billion for resettlement, but added more last year, bringing the total to $7.2 billion. On top of that, the government has spent $1.6 billion to stabilize erosion and prevent landslides.

A newly launched seven-point project to alleviate pollution and monitor landslides will require even more money as it expands, he said.

'The geological disaster in this area has been effectively controlled,' Mr. Wang said. 'That is not to say that in the future there will not be dangerous phenomena -- including landslides -- but we believe that the Chinese government has paid attention to this,' he said, adding that he didn't believe there would be a major loss of life or property along the Yangtze.

Mr. Wang's comments also reflect a reversal of sorts of official opinion on the project -- at least in public. In September, China's official Xinhua news agency revealed that government experts -- including Mr. Wang -- held a meeting on the project and expressed worries the dam could trigger an environmental 'catastrophe.' The comments were widely reported in China's state media. Xinhua also cited an August story in The Wall Street Journal about the landslides and other unforeseen consequences of the dam.

'We can by no means relax our vigilance against ecological and environmental security problems or profit from a fleeting economic boom at the cost of sacrificing the environment,' said Mr. Wang at the September meeting, according to Xinhua. Mr. Wang said Premier Wen Jiabao had raised the issue of environmental problems during a cabinet meeting earlier this year.

Critics have long warned about the consequences of building the dam in the overpopulated, geologically fragile and culturally rich Three Gorges region.

Construction of the 180-meter-tall dam was officially started in 1994 after years of delays and controversy. As the dam was completed, China's longest river was blocked, creating a 640-kilometer-long reservoir stretching across Hubei and Sichuan provinces in central and western China and displacing some 1.4 million people. Authorities plan to fill the reservoir to its maximum depth of 175 meters by 2009.

Now, Mr. Wang and others seem to be denying the problems are bigger than originally expected. Repeating earlier assessments, he said water-pollution problems were limited to tributaries to the Yangtze, and that the region had been prone to deadly landslides long before the dam was built.

He also denied that plans to encourage an additional four million people to relocate from the banks of the reservoir and the surrounding impoverished region were linked to the Three Gorges project. Local officials and researchers say that at least two million people now living along the banks of Yangtze have to be moved to ease pollution and poverty worsened when hundreds of villages were forced to higher ground to make way for the dam.