Man-induced Earthquakes, Power and Knowledg

I was watching a Weather Channel documentary while eating my lunch the other day. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nB23W0fIDl8&index=31&list=PLki90Aw2GjddE7j9gsNyZ2BLOS9onitwN) It was about earthquakes. I like documentaries about the secret of nature, so I kept watching. It turned out to be one of the serials of documentaries called The Secret of the Earth. This episode was not about naturally occurring earthquakes but about man-induced ones. Among other human creativities, dams and reservoirs are a major way of triggering man-made earthquakes. A great example is Hoover Dam. There are also other cases happening in India, Egypt and China. This was more and more horrifying to me and the horror culminated when the Great Wenchuan (in Sichuan province in the west part of China) Earthquake was cited as an example. It refreshed a nightmarish memory in me. The disaster occurred at 14:28:01 China Standard Time on May 12, 2008. Measuring at 8.0 Richter scale, it claimed over 69,000 lives, with another 18,000 reported as missing  and  with about 4.8 million people left homeless. The memory is painful to me even now.

What is more horrifying than the earthquake itself is the fact that this could be man-induced. A large dam built 20 kilometers away from the damaged area is reported in the video to be the final straw that killed the camel. Both seismic theory and empirical experiments have shown that large new reservoirs can trigger earthquakes. This is due to either change in stress because of the weight of water, or more commonly by increased groundwater pore pressure decreasing the effective strength of the rock under the reservoir. For triggered earthquakes to occur, both mechanisms require that the area is already under considerable tectonic stress. This agrees with the conditions under which the dam was built. It was one of the newly built constructions promoted by China’s Great West Exploration policy and it was located exactly on a major seismic fault. Later on, I read more about it and found out that the dam project was highly contentious even before it was embarked on, with many seismologists objecting to the construction on grounds of its seismic hazards. But the voices were muffled to satisfy the “Great Strategic Exploration”, a kind of blind development at the price of environment deterioration and people’s lives, only to fit the regime’s political goal of flexing its management prowess.

This reminds me so much of the critical theorists’ idea about knowledge and power (see Paris & Winn, 2014, Humanizing research in dehumanizing spaces): the production and control of knowledge is a means through which dominant groups maintain and exercise power over the oppressed people. Keeping the general public as ignorance as possible has always been the regime’s instrument of power. It has been manifest in its control of the mass media, publication, public school policy and curriculum (esp. through literacy, history and “political science”), etc. As a result, children thus inculcated can hardly see or think anything different from that which is expected for them to know. Another implication for us would be that it is equally impossible for an inculcated researchers to see anything beyond his ideological training. In practice, they will unconsciously set standards for the subjects to meet and made their judgement accordingly. This is exactly what is happening in China's sociological research in rural communities, which are always characterized by researchers as ignorant, backwards, and self-isolated. The paradigm is still damage centered and dehumanized, without the voices of the subjects themselves being heard (based on a recent personal conversation with a former sociologist colleague).