China’s Three Gorges Dam is the single biggest construction project since the Great Wall of China was built 8,000 years ago. The hydroelectric dam was planned in the 80s and is one of the largest plants of its kind in the world. It has been the subject of China’s pride in their developing power and derided for its wide-ranging affects on the country side. Some even think that it may have, it part, been responsible for the Sichuan earthquake that recently devastated the region. But truly the most pronounced impact of the dam is the roughly 4 million people it’s been said will have to be relocated as a result of the shifting waters.

One family that’s been forced out by the rising waters is the subject of Up the Yangtze, a Canadian documentary that got a lot of praise at Hot Docs this year, and deservedly so. It’s a frank depiction of the struggles of the average, everyday people of China who are struggling to even maintain an impoverished sate of living while their country grows to the brink of modernization. These people live an incredibly simple life in a wall-less shanty while farming for their food off the land that will slowly be eaten up by the rising Yangtze.

Filmmaker Yung Chang set out to make a film about the river valley that had such a profound impact on the youth of his grandfather. Arriving in China though, he discovers that the world of his grandfather, for all intents and purposes, no longer exists. It’s been flooded in China’s growing need for more power. The Yu family become symbolic of this struggle. They’ve already been moved once, but they’re once again faced with the inevitable and the possibility of having to pack up their life and once again head for higher ground. And if you think that the Chinese government is there to help, forget about it! It’s everyman for himself time.

Young Shui Yu must forgo high school, which her family can’t afford, and must enter the work force as a kitchen worker on a cruise ship that travels up the Yangtze and allows tourists to visit the ghost towns and port cities along the river. On the boat, she and other Chinese natives must learn English and are given “English names.” Shui becomes Cindy, and Cindy has trouble adjusting to the demands of the job even though she’s probably making more money in a week than her family does in a year. Chang dramatically illustrates the incredible disparagements between the image of China as a world power and the conditions of its most downtrodden citizenry.

Up the Yangtze is a paralyzing and myopic portrait of the cost of China’s rush to industrialize and “catch up” with the West. A lot of people justly question China’s treatment of people it labels as “political dissidents” but isn’t this treatment of their unassuming peasant population just as deserving of mention. It’s not referenced in the film, but the Dam, which originally promised to deliver 10 per cent of China’s needed power, will now barely provide as much as three per cent because of rapid growth. Considering the cost and the loss of farm land and history, it seems that Chang is just in asking, “Is it worth it?”