"The Chinese Dam Threatening the World’s Most Endangered Ape", Inside Climate News, 17 August 2025

Activists and scientists inside Indonesia and out had hoped to block the dam [...] they faced blowback and intimidation. Local activists received threatening calls and texts from unknown numbers. Some were brought in for questioning by the police. Two foreign scientists were dismissed from positions with a Swiss conservation group operating in Sumatra.

Neither the companies that own the dam nor several Chinese and Indonesian government offices or ministries responded to requests for comment for this article. The dam’s backers have said it would support Sumatra’s power grid while reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Any impacts on orangutans, they have claimed, would be small and can be largely mitigated.

[...] early in the morning on Oct. 3, 2019, Golfrid Siregar, WALHI North Sumatra’s legal manager, was brought to a hospital, unconscious and badly injured. The men who transported Siregar there reportedly told staff they had found him by the side of the road. He died from his injuries three days later.

The police would say the cause of death was a motorbike accident, but people close to him doubted this finding and pointed to numerous irregularities. Siregar suffered primarily from head injuries, for example, while the rest of his body was largely uninjured […] Siregar’s laptop, wallet and ring were missing, as was his helmet [...].

The dam owner, North Sumatera Hydro Energy, or NSHE, was at that point majority owned by a subsidiary of Zhefu Holding Group, an energy equipment manufacturing company based in China. The remaining shares were held by Indonesia’s state-owned utility and a Singapore-based company that was owned by ‘several Indonesian individuals who develop projects in the renewable energy sector,’ according to a World Bank Group disclosure related to a separate hydroelectric project. The principal financier had been Bank of China [...].

Neither the parent companies of NSHE nor the North Sumatra Police responded to requests for comment, though NSHE’s chief executive at the time publicly denied having anything to do with Siregar’s death.

[...] In June 2020, PLN, Indonesia’s state-owned utility and a minority owner of the dam, announced that the project was delayed, citing the pandemic and the protests from environmental groups. By the following year, however, NSHE had a new majority owner: SDIC Power Holdings, a subsidiary of the State Development and Investment Corp., a large Chinese state-owned enterprise. With Bank of China gone, the new owners would eventually secure financing from the Export-Import Bank of China, a state policy bank.

SDIC Power did not respond to requests for comment.

[...] the winding road that runs parallel to the Batang Toru river fills with workers on motorbikes in blue jumpsuits bearing the name Sinohydro, the Chinese state-owned company contracted to build the dam.

Villagers say the work has sent animals out of the forest and into their farms and fruit groves. In one village, a man who asked that his name not be published said hordes of monkeys have invaded their fields, sometimes hundreds at a time, eating anything they can—durians, snake fruit, coffee, cacao. Neither NSHE nor its contractors have offered any help, he said.