To call the Yangtze dam a "short term gain" is ... short sighted. Now, I can't speak to the effectiveness of the dam, but its goals and objectives were literal

To call the Yangtze dam a "short term gain" is ... short sighted. Now, I can't speak to the effectiveness of the dam, but its goals and objectives were literally epic in scope. But to understand the goals, you have to understand the history, and that history stretches so far back that it merges with legend... Legend has it that one of the early great kings of china was 大禹 (Yu the Great). But what made him great? Was he a great conqueror like Alexander? Was he a descendant of the gods? No. Yu was "great" because he built the first major floods control projects for the Yangtze river. Pause and think about this for bit. How horrible must the floods have been for a king to have literally entered legendary status for managing them? The Yangtze river has been the lifeblood of northern China for thousands of years. But it has also literally killed 100's of millions of people. Historically, the river floods quite often, and once in a while floods on a massive, epic, scale. The sort of flood that covers thousands of square miles under many meters of water. The sort of flood that wipes out settlements across vast swaths of land and kill millions of people. Then millions die of disease and starvation. The mouth of the Yangtze has moved hundreds of miles during recorded history. And this doesn't happen little by little... it happens catastrophically with huge floods that have kill 10s of millions. Think of the Mississippi mouth moving from where it is today to someplace in south texas or georgia. The Yangtze river is that kind of epic (but not in the good way). The Three Gorges Dam was built with the intention of finally, once and for all, controlling the Yangtze. Now, in a few centuries, maybe history will show that it was a bad idea. Or maybe history will show it was one of the most important works of civil construction in human history. Hard to say right now. But what is clear is that it wasn't built with "short term gain" in mind. That dam is the definition of long-term civil engineering (for good or ill).