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As a child growing up in rural China in the 1960s Cao Guangjing often didn't have enough to eat although his mother was a wheat, corn and cotton farmer and his father a village schoolteacher.

Decades later, the hungry boy has become a globally-acclaimed engineer, responsible for the success of the world's biggest hydropower project with a workforce of more than 14,000 people.

Dr Cao is chairman of the China Three Gorges Corporation with clean energy business interests in 25 countries, possible future collaborations with Australian companies and another four big hydropower dams under way upstream on the Yangtze River from where the Three Gorges dam is located.

At UWA recently to deliver the 26th Dr George Hondros memorial lecture, Dr Cao said the China of his childhood was a backward country.

"Everyone knew the only way to escape poverty was to go to university," he said. "As a boy I knew nothing about university or the professions, but one of my senior high school teachers recommended that I go to Hohai University, a research university in Nanjing, to study civil engineering."

In 1997, aged 33, Dr Cao became the Three Gorges project manager, having carried out analysis of the project's feasibility, planning and design since 1985.

"The benefits of the project outweigh the harm," he said. "The mighty Yangtze River used to flood every 10 years, resulting in great loss of life and property. Today, the project's flood storage capacity protects the fertile Jianghan Plain.

"The project also improves the navigability of the river, with a double-line, five-stage ship lock part of the design. With more ships using the waterway, petrol consumption has decreased, resulting in a reduction of exhaust emissions. And the total amount of annual hydropower generation is equal to burning 50 million tons of raw coal.

"The project has also included building 16 ultra-large bridges over the Yangtze and its tributaries, as well as two airports, the construction of 133km of expressways, 2,000km of highways and 26 sewerage and 19 garbage treatment plants."

Dr Cao said one of the biggest problems he encountered was the fact that during its setting process, concrete releases a lot of heat.

"Failure to efficiently control the temperature rise could result in cracks, so we had to install large-capacity integrated control techniques and not a single crack appeared in four million cubic metres of concrete!"

While overseeing the project, Dr Cao completed a PhD in management training and credits his understanding of management techniques to the success of the undertaking, in which every major milestone during the 17 years of construction was reached on or ahead of schedule.

"In some ways, being a manager is like being a member of a family," said Dr Cao, whose proud parents are still alive. He has three siblings and a 20 year-old son who is majoring in electrical engineering. "You have to offer friendship and you also have to reward good work to ensure quality. It's also important to keep people well informed about the project. And they need to know that if they do a great job they'll gain respect from their boss and honour from their government."

The Dr George Hondros lecture honours Dr Hondros (1920 - 1965) who for many years was a senior member of staff of the Department of Civil Engineering, now the School of Civil and Resource Engineering. His major legacy to this State was his input into the Narrows Bridge project as a structural engineer.

Published in UWA News , 30 May 2011