Mei Yunzhong (L) and his colleague place cables to install cable service for low-income farmer Yu Weidong at Yu's house in Shuping Village of Zigui County, central China's Hubei Province, Sept. 4, 2011.
Sitting in the living room of his house at a mountain village named Shuping in the Three Gorges area, Yu Weidong and his wife burst into laughter as Zhao Benshan, a famous comedian in China, appeared on TV.
Even though speaking a dialect totally different from that of Zhao Benshan, Yu said he understood Zhao's jokes.
"I love this guy,"Yu said, "he is so funny."
Yu Weidong's family is one of the 7500 or so households that are connected to a cable TV network set up and maintained by a team headed by Mei Yunzhong, 45, director of the Cultural Service Center of Shazhenxi Township.
Mei's cable TV network took shape in 2002 as local residents called for information and news on resettlement policies during the construction of the Three Gorges Reservoir.
To build the network, Mei and his team, who were in short of investment, even took back abandoned cable poles to cut down the cost.
In January 2002, Shazhenxi Cable TV was launched with 124 subscribers. After a decade of hard work, 75 percent of homes in the mountainous township have be provided access to cable service.
For ages, the Chinese suffered from the flood-prone Yangtze. For ages, the Chinese strived to tame the unforgiving waters.
A water control project at the Three Gorges area was envisaged as early as 1918 by Dr. Sun Yat-sen, forerunner of China's democratic revolution in the early 20th century, but was shelved due to technical obstacles and social turbulence until Communist leader Mao Zedong proposed a dam and reservoir at the Three Gorges area in the 1950s.
It was hoped, in a poem penned by Chairman Mao in 1956, that "walls of stone will stand upstream to the west", from which "a smooth lake" would arise in "the narrow gorges".
Since then, China had kicked off preparation for harnessing the Yangtze and constructing the Three Gorges project.
A great amount of work in investigations, feasibility studies, tests and examinations, had been done with the participation of thousands of experts from China and abroad. A small dam was even built in the middle and upper reaches of the Yangtze River as a trial-and-error project.
After protracted debates and researches for around half a century, the plan to build a dam for flood control and power generation was approved in 1992 and the construction of the Three Gorges project, whose main components include the dam, a five-tier ship lock, and 26 hydropower turbo-generators, began one year after.
Completed in 2006, the Three Gorges Dam run at full capacity in 2008 for the first time as water levels at the 185-meter-deep dam reached 175 meters.
In a statement issued in May 2011, the State Council, or China's cabinet, admitted that the Three Gorges project had caused some problems ranging from resident relocation to geological hazards while bringing "great and comprehensive benefits".
But life still carries on. People, millions of them, are making their little but valuable contribution towards the success of the world's largest water control and hydroelectric project. (Xinhua/Hao Tongqian)
