There are many local movements to stop dams by fierce public opposition. Chinese NGOs, the media and people displaced by dams. Sometimes they are successful. Although the hydropower companies had long wanted to dam Tiger Leaping Gorge, work here never started [1].  The campaign to protect Tiger Leaping Gorge, which ran from 2004 to 2006, not only safeguarded one of China’s most magnificent landscapes, but it also saved the homes of more than 100,000 ethnic minority peoples, making the campaign one of the biggest success stories for  China’s green defenders [1].  Liu Jianqiang covered this story as a reporter for Southern Weekend. On 27 July 2004, the state news agency Xinhua reported that the NDRC had reviewed and passed the Planning Report on the Damming of the Middle Reaches of the Jinsha River. It had recommended that work should start soon on the Tiger Leaping Gorge dam.

In the plan, hydropower stations, forming an eight-dam cascade starting at Tiger Leaping Gorge, would be built on the middle reaches of the Jinsha River [1].  It would forcibly displace 100,000 people and about 13,333 hectares of good agricultural land would be submerged [1]. 

The main public opponent of the dams at Tiger Leaping Gorge was a man named Xiao Liangzhong. He was an anthropologist and an editor at a Beijing-based publishing house, who hailed from the Tiger Leaping Gorge area. His grandmother, parents and brothers all still lived there.  He was 31 years old and full of energy.

The plan to turn the middle reaches of the Jinsha River into an eight-dam cascade had Tiger Leaping Gorge at the top, and the Jinanqiao hydropower station as the fifth dam. Jinanqiao was owned by the Beijing Huarui Investment Group, and preparatory work on the dam had started in 2002. The dam was to be 156 metres high, with a total installed capacity of 2,500 megawatts. According to the plan, the river would be dammed by 2005.

Local villagers said they suspected that construction work on the Jinanqiao dam was illegal: that it had begun without approval from the central government. A journalist, with help from the Lisu ethnic group,  bypassed the guards and saw various cargo trucks busying back and forth like ants, two of the dam’s diversion tunnels starting to take shape, and the main building works, such as the cofferdam, already under construction.

The journalists also found out from a government source that the town of Lijiang would earn about 4 million yuan in tax revenues from the dam – and that this was why the local government there had warmly welcomed the project. .

Back in Beijing, the project had definitely not yet been approved. Journalist phoned an official from the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA, now the MEP) and he sounded shocked: ‘That’s a world-famous site of natural beauty. How could anyone build a powerstation there?!’ [1]. 

The journalists' article was published on the front page of Southern Weekend on 29 September 2004, with the headline ‘Emergency at Tiger Leaping Gorge’. It focused public attention on the issue. Following this report, Chinese and international media began to cover the story. It became the biggest environmental story since the campaign to stop the Nu River dam.

The article quoted environmentalists who said that the Tiger Leaping Gorge dam could wipe out whole species. The resettlement of the Naxi ethnic group, who live along the banks of the Jinsha River, would mean the irreversible loss of the traditional sites and accumulated wisdom of their Dongba ritual culture. But supporters of the dam stressed its economic benefits. Director of the Management Bureau of the Three Parallel Rivers, Ma Suhong, said: ‘We need to lift the people out of poverty.’

His view was challenged by  anthropologist and editor Xiao Liangzhong. Land in the Jinsha River Valley above Tiger Leaping Gorge was both fertile and flat, he said. It was a traditional farming community with excellent quality soil. The compensation fund for relocation was far less than what the local people would really lose. High-quality farmland would be submerged. Clearly, the skilled farmers of this river valley would be impoverished if they were evicted from their land. The plan for the Tiger Leaping Gorge dam estimated that 100,000 people would need to be relocated. When these people were moved, they wouldn’t be able to find land as good as that they had been farming. Once-prosperous villages would sink into poverty.

Moreover, the Southern Weekend report confirmed two important points. First, construction work on the Jinanqiao hydropower station was unlawful. Second, the 100,000 local people hadn’t been informed about what would happen to them, and were categorically opposed to being resettled [1]. 

Li Xiaoxi was an associate professor at the Air Force Command Institute, and knew an official in the office of the premier, Wen Jiabao. She called that official the day after our article was published and said that Wen should read it – and see that a dam was being built illegally at Tiger Leaping Gorge. The official replied: ‘We’ve seen this article. It’s a good story with solid facts.’ Shortly afterwards, Wen Jiabao ordered the project suspended, while the NDRC investigated the situation [1]. 

However, the building plans was continued. According to source [3] in early 2006, hydro companies and the local government started preliminary work on Tiger Leaping Gorge. Helicopters flew in the sky, and surveyors appeared in the fields. The surveyors would put down markers in the fields at night, and in the morning the farmers would pull them out again. The conflict kept escalating until March 21, 2006, when farmers seized a group of seven surveyors and held them hostage in the fields. The villagers did not think that the surveyors had the central government’s approval. The next morning, a government official said he was taking a surveyor to breakfast, and then helped him escape. The villagers were enraged. According to an old Naxi woman, "“The official was chased by the angry villagers from the field all the way to the river. He had no choice but to jump in!” she laughed. “He was saved later, but even then the police wouldn’t fight us. They said, ‘How can we fight our own parents?’”

The angry villagers began gathering in front of the local government building. Soon, 10,000 people from the surrounding area showed up. They brought metal bars and rocks with them. However, local leaders received a tip from a local official: the provincial government wanted to resolve the conflict as quickly as possible. The government was ready to make concessions, but armed police would be sent in if the protest continued. In the morning, the provincial government posted a statement all over town: the Tiger Leaping Gorge dam was to be stopped, and any further dams will not be built without the consent of the locals. The jubilant villagers took the flyers home to keep as evidence. A violent conflict had been avoided, and their homes were saved [3].

As explained by Shi Jiangtao in South China Morning Post [2] the provincial authorities and presumably also the central authorities (as described in [1], heed public outcry after strong local opposition and international concern. This is one of the deepest river canyons in the world and close to a World Heritage site. 'They decided to stop damming of the gorge so as to preserve the integrity of the natural scenery at the gorge and ancient villages nearby,' sources familiar with the discussions said [2]. Instead, authorities planned to move the dam 200km upstream to a Tibetan-populated area bordering Weixi and Deqin counties in Diqing .

At the Tiger Leaping Gorge a 276-metre-high dam had been proposed. This would be on the Jinsha (Yangtze) River at the gorge but the plan was shelved since 2004 following a rare public outcry. The proposed dam was the biggest hydropower project along the Jinsha's middle reaches, and was to have been accompanied by seven smaller dams downstream [2].

More than 100,000 residents, mostly farmers from ethnic minorities in Shangri-la and Yulong counties, would have been evicted to make way for the project [2].

The proposed damming of Tiger Leaping Gorge was also aimed at diverting water from the Jinsha to the centre of the province, including the provincial capital, Kunming . The central government has deliberately maintained an ambiguous stance on the fate of the gorge since the State Council ordered an investigation in 2004 into allegations that construction had started without its approval.

Former water resources minister Wang Shucheng had told the South China Morning Post in April 2007, shortly before his retirement, that the damming of Tiger Leaping Gorge was unlikely to go ahead. He said that despite the project's promising economic returns from power generation, the central government was highly concerned about its 'irreparable damage' to the local environment and the unique culture of the ethnic minorities [2].

Villagers have welcomed the scrapping of the controversial dam plan, which they had strongly opposed in a rare show of defiance against the powerful electricity developers and development-minded local authorities.(2). The prolonged debate over the proposed dam seriously disrupted the local economy and people's livelihoods. Villagers even sent a petition letter to Beijing protesting against the damming of the gorge.

There was a world impact from these news of 2007. Thus The Guardian reported [5] that China abandons plans for huge dam on Yangtze (by David Stanway) on 29 Dec 2007. "China has abandoned controversial plans to build a huge dam which would have submerged one of the country's most renowned tourist areas and forced the relocation of 100,000 residents in the south-western province of Yunnan. In a rare and high-profile victory for China's environmental movement, the project at Tiger Leaping Gorge on the upper reaches of the Yangtze river was scrapped". "Yu Xiaogang, a campaigner with the local Green Watershed organisation, said profits of national power companies - rather than the economic development of Yunnan - were the driving force behind the carving up of the region's rivers".