DURING THE1950s,Stalinist planners (whose modest slogan was "We order the wind when to blow, the rain when to fall!") wantedto flip the direction of several voluminousnorth-flowing rivers of Western Siberia(Irtysh, Ob, Yenisei) and use them tochange the Soviet Central Asia into an ir-rigated communist paradise. Fortunately,Stalin ,died and Khrushchev had otherproblems, but before 1960, the megapro-ject propensities of the Soviet expertsworking in Mao's China left a deep imprinton China's water engineers. Soviet expertshelped plan a number of audacious waterprojects but only one, the first dam acrossthe Huanghe, or Yellow River, at San-menxia, was completed before their with-drawal. The dam turned out to be a majordisaster, and the rapid silting of the reser-voir was solved years later only by creatinglarge outlets at the dam's bottom and dras-tically reducing its electricity-generatingcapacity.
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