Myitsone Dam Irrawaddy projects during the contracted 50 years, more than CPI's return on investment during the fifty years Chinese operation period according to the President of CPI. However, the government economic calculations have been criticized for not considering potential environmental and societal impacts. The dam was planned to be a concrete faced rock-fill dam high and long, and projected to produce 6,000 MW of electricity by 2017. This is equivalent to 27% of the output of the Three Gorges Dam In China, the world's largest electricity-generating plant of any kind. Minister of Electric Power Zaw Min claimed that the dam was
Three Gorges Dam 1947. After the 1949 Communist takeover, Mao Zedong supported the project, but began the Gezhouba Dam project nearby first, and economic problems including the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution slowed progress. After the 1954 Yangtze River Floods, in 1956, Mao Zedong authored "Swimming", a poem about his fascination with a dam on the Yangtze River. In 1958, after the Hundred Flowers Campaign, some engineers who spoke out against the project were imprisoned. During the 1980s, the idea of a dam reemerged. The National People's Congress approved the dam in 1992: out of 2,633 delegates, 1,767 voted in favour,