Preconceptions of Chinese life shattered

Press, 3 April 1989, Page 7

Preconceptions of Chinese life shattered

By

NIGEL MALTHUS

A Christchurch man who has just returned from three months working in China says his preconceptions of the country were “absolutely shattered — and pleasantly so.”

Mr lan McLymont is a senior consultant with the Electricorp subsidiary, Design Power. He had been called in — the only New Zealander in a small team of overseas experts — to help commission a big hydro-electric power scheme for Yunnan province, in south-west China. He said that, in the past at least, New Zealanders were taught a false picture of China, creating fear and ignorance. What surprised Mr McLymont most was the ethnic mix. There were a number of minorities with

facial features and colourful traditional dress more akin to the Thais or Burmese than the majority Han people. The Communist political system did not seem to intrude on daily life, he said. There was a big bureaucracy, but that was understandable in a country of a billion people. The power project was in an area normally closed to foreigners, probably because the authorities were sensitive to its backwardness, said Mr McLymont, but possibly for reasons of military security. It was only about 200 km from the Vietnamese border, and he believed there had been armed ethnic violence as recently as 1983.

Nevertheless, he was able to travel widely during his time off. The roads

were sealed but congested, with few cars but many bicycles, trucks, carts pulled by ponies or people, and people on foot. Even children and elderly women habitually

carried large loads, he said.

“Some of the towns had never seen Europeans. We were very much curiosities to them,” he said. Mr McLymont said the Lubuge Power Project, on which he worked, was the first in that part of China contracted to foreigners, and was regarded as highly prestigious.

Similar in size and concept to Manapouri, it consisted of a 100 m high rockfill dam, a 9.4 km tunnel, and an underground powerhouse with four 150mW generators. It was funded by China, the World Bank, and Australia, through the Australian International Development Aid Bureau. The Japanese built the tunnels, switchgear and transformers, and a West German and Norwegian

consortium provided the turbines and generators. Australia’s Snowy Mountain Engineering Corporation acted as consultants, and called in Mr McLymont to oversee the testing during the commissioning phase. Mr McLymont, who was the Electricity Department’s resident engineer in Twizel for four years, said that, given the chance, he would return to China tomorrow.

He may yet get the chance. Although demand for electricity now outstrips supply in Yunnan province, it is a mountainous region with a huge theoretical potential for hydro power, and has ambitions eventually to export electricity both to China’s power-hungry eastern provinces, and to Thailand in the south.