Ideas for a Chinese Agriculture Improvement Proyect

Excerpt from the brief of the year 1984:
“On the other hand, as the spring floods of the Yangtze were contained, many flooded, lacustrine lands would be exposed, ready for cultivation, so that the territory that should be flooded in the Han Valley would be more than compensated.
If it were possible to bring the waters of the Yangtze to the Great Plain, the spring harvest could be helped by irrigation during the sowing and harvesting seasons, and the harvest would be improved and secured during the monsoon rains. With this, almost all of the Great Plain, 35 million hectares, would provide two crops and a considerable increase in yields per hectare. I would stop depending on the whim of the rains.
In addition, when the Yangtze was regularized with the reservoir, the lower valley of the great river would receive much less water and large lake and swampy areas could be cultivated.
I am also aware that the project I suggest is of colossal dimensions and demands a huge human and economic effort. It is possible that there are other means of increasing the yields of the Chinese field sufficiently. What I do believe is that, if this project were feasible and could be put into practice, the gigantic state would have secured a very firm agrarian base.
However, the realization of such a great work would not surprise us at all from a town that has managed to complete collective tasks as colossal as the Great Wall, the Grand Canal and, above all, the colonization of the great swamps that covered in the early times the low plains. ”