In China, Three Gorges Dam's image showing some cracks

White-haired Zhao Chengmu lives just below the Three Gorges Dam, China's largest construction project since the Great Wall. If the colossal structure fails, the fragile 77-year-old shop owner will be one of the first to die.

But that's never going to happen, he says.

"This dam will be here for eternity," Zhao boasts. "Even if this dam is hit by a U.S. missile, it won't break — it'll just shake once."

Like Zhao, most Chinese herald their government's monumental enterprise to defy the mighty Yangtze River, choke off its devastating annual floodwaters and harness its raw power to provide cleaner energy. Such a mammoth engineering feat, they say, only serves to underscore mankind's supremacy over nature.

Critics consider the dam in less lofty terms: as Beijing's boondoggle. With an official price tag of $25 billion — and some estimates claiming three times that much — the costliest hydropower project in history demonstrates China's sheer arrogance in trying to tame nature's whims, they say, never mind the 3,000 tons of garbage that have been flowing every day into the reservoir recently.

A year after the dam went into full operation, cracks are already showing in the public image of the project. This year's torrential rains, the nation's worst in a decade, have severely tested the project's capacity to control the surging Yangtze, the world's third-longest river.

Last month, when floodwaters poured into the dam's 400-mile-long reservoir at 565,000 cubic feet per second, a government official acknowledged that "the dam's flood-control capacity is not unlimited" and hinted that more severe flooding could even risk the structure's collapse.

That's a far cry from the highfalutin claims of just a few years ago. In 2003, officials boasted that the dam could withstand the worst flood in 10,000 years. In 2007, the estimate was reduced to 1,000 years. In 2008, it was dropped yet again, this time to just 100 years.

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