To its opponents, China's Three Gorges dam on the Yangtze River is all the more tragic because it has a historical precedent. Built in the 1950s, the huge Sanmenxia – literally Three Gates Gorge – dam in central China is today regarded as a catastrophic failure with senior Communist party officials blaming it for many of the environmental and social problems that afflict the region.

The Sino-Soviet engineering team that designed it was asked to control flooding, produce electricity and improve transport on the Yellow River – the same reasons cited for building the Three Gorges dam.

Like the Three Gorges, the Sanmenxia project was supported by China's Communist party elite, including Mao Zedong, and was built without adequate planning for the potential negative consequences of such a radical disruption of China's second-largest river.

“This dam was really a stupid mistake,” says An Qingyuan, a former Communist party boss of Shaanxi province, the region most directly affected by the project and its aftermath. “We should consider all such projects from a scientific perspective and if it's not scientific we shouldn't do these stupid things. It was so stupid, stupid, I say.”

Mr An has campaigned for years to have the dam demolished and his condemnation is echoed in the highest corridors of power, even by staunch supporters of the Three Gorges project.

The only people who have anything good to say about Sanmenxia are low-level Communist officials in the rural areas close to the dam, who dutifully repeat the outdated party line that the dam's benefits outweigh its negative consequences – echoing present-day pronouncements on the Three Gorges dam, the world's largest hydropower project.

“The Sanmenxia dam has brought severe disasters to the people living near the river and those disasters far outweigh any benefits that might have come from the dam at one time,” Mr An says.

Worsening water shortages across the region – caused in part by the Sanmenxia and other ill-advised hydropower and water transfer projects – have stoked land disputes.

As soon as the dam was completed, sediment in the murky Yellow River – known for centuries as “China's sorrow” because of its devastating floods – began to build up behind it, leading the authorities to rebuild the dam within a few years.

Despite a complete reconstruction in the early 1960s, sedimentation continued and spread up river, eventually leading to the very floods it was meant to prevent and causing Mao to angrily pronounce that if the dam did not work it should be blown up. By then, more than 400,000 people had been forcefully evicted to make way for the dam and its reservoir and many were living in slum-like conditions in nearby towns.

As the river silted up and industrial overuse reduced its flow, large areas of arable land re-emerged from the reservoir, prompting many of the peasant farmers to return to the land to eke out a living. In the mid-1980s, the government officially relocated large numbers of displaced peasants back to their ancestral homes but allocated most of them just a fraction of the land they had left more than two decades before.

“I was a teenager when the government made us leave our land and we were moved back in 1986,” says Liu Cuiying, the 60-year-old wife of a peasant farmer living in the reservoir region. “All we are asking for, still, is the land that belonged to my family. How can we survive if we can't get the land we deserve?”

In the Three Gorges region, the relocation of at least 1.3m people has led to land disputes and government crackdowns and some officials fear that, as in the case of Sanmenxia, problems will worsen as migrants struggle to adjust to new environments.

Critics of the Three Gorges project have warned that many of the Sanmenxia dam's worst environmental consequences, including sedimentation, chronic pollution and worsening floods, are likely to afflict the new project as well.

Today the Sanmenxia dam supplies electricity only sporadically and in tiny quantities, despite claims at the time of its construction that it would provide one-third of the nation's power needs.

Similar claims were made for the Three Gorges dam, which senior officials said would provide one-tenth of the country's electricity supply. But as electricity demand soars and the dam's numerous flaws begin to emerge, those claims have been quietly dropped.

“The world has entered a post-dam period and the Sanmenxia dam was clearly a mistake,” says Wu Xinmu, a professor at Wuhan University and a leading expert on China's water resource management.

“We should learn from the lesson of Sanmenxia and consider the long-term influence of dams rather than the short-term benefits.”