Tasang Dam Grid Company, China Three Gorges Project Corporation and the British Malcolm Dunstan & Associates. The groundbreaking ceremony for the dam was in March 2007, but since the ceremony, actual construction of the dam has been stalled, and there has been little activity at the dam-site. Since 1996, as many as 300,000 villagers, mostly Shan people have been displaced to make room for the Tasang Dam’s reservoir. Thousands more relocations are expected as construction progresses. The dam’s reservoir will dissect Shan State in half –almost to the Chinese border – and will negatively impact the local communities and ecosystems. Myanmar’s Junta
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,