Does China has any strategy to minimize the damage in case Three Gorge Dam get blown up? They can build several smaller dams along the Yangtze to block the water..
Some people said missiles cannot reach the dam, but not if US launches dozens of stealth tomahawks like yesterday. All it takes is one missile to crack open the dam. If US feels determination, they will go for 40 cruise missiles at once.
You're
overestimating the destructive power of cruise missiles by a wide margin.
First, get this basic concept straight in your mind: the Three Gorges Dam is a massive
concrete gravity dam. It is far stronger and more solid than ordinary natural granite mountain rock. Do you seriously believe that a few dozen cruise missiles could cause such an engineered colossus to collapse entirely?
Anyone with a modicum of common sense knows that
in wartime, the dam would never be allowed to maintain a high-reservoir water level. So even if the dam were somehow seriously damaged or breached, it wouldn't produce the apocalyptic downstream flooding catastrophe you're imagining — because the reservoir would have been deliberately drawn down well in advance, drastically reducing the volume of water that could be released and the resulting surge.
And in this entire discussion, I haven't even bothered to mention the fact that the dam sits
hundreds of kilometers deep inside China's air-defense network. Unless the entire Chinese military falls asleep, there's simply no realistic way for those late-20th-century-designed cruise missiles (subsonic, relatively slow, large radar cross-section, low-altitude but not stealthy) to penetrate all the way to the target unmolested. Not to mention that the ships or platforms launching those missiles would have entered China's military surveillance envelope long before they could even fire — they'd likely be detected, tracked, and neutralized well in advance.
If the Chinese navy no longer exists, you can try launching cruise missiles like you did with Iran.
