China's infrastructure splurge: Rushing on by road, rail and

[Rubedo]

http://www.economist.com/world/asia/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10697210

China's race to build roads, railways and airports speeds ahead. Democracy, says an official, would sacrifice efficiency

“IT'S like approaching the Forbidden City, it's absolutely incredible.” The adjective is one that Mouzhan Majidi, chief executive of Foster + Partners, liberally attaches to Beijing's new airport terminal, designed by his British firm. The world's largest, designed in the gently sinuous form of a Chinese dragon, it was planned and built in four years by an army of 50,000 workers. “The columns on the outside are red and you see them marching for miles and miles,” says Mr Majidi.

A little hyperbole is understandable. The terminal is 3km (1.8 miles) long. The floor space is 17% bigger than all the terminals at London's Heathrow combined (including about-to-open Terminal Five). Chinese officials like the Forbidden City analogy. Just as the towering vermilion walls and golden roofs of the imperial palace inspire visitors with awe, China wants its golden-roofed terminal to impress those arriving for the Olympic games in August. Part of a $3.8 billion expansion, which included the opening of a third runway in October, it is due to open on February 29th, weeks ahead of schedule.

The new terminal is not merely window-dressing for foreigners. Beijing badly needs to expand its handling capacity. In 2002 the airport ranked 26th in passenger numbers worldwide. Now it is the ninth busiest. China's rapid economic growth and equally rapid integration into the global economic system is putting huge strains on its infrastructure. This has led to a spate of spending on transport. Between 2001 and the end of 2005 more was spent on roads, railways and other fixed assets than was spent in the previous 50 years. According to the state media, investment will see double-digit growth every year for the rest of the decade. Between 2006 and 2010, $200 billion is expected to be invested in railways alone, four times more than in the previous five years.

Superlatives abound. The world's longest sea-crossing bridge is due to open in June: a 36km six-lane highway across Hangzhou Bay (about the same length as the undersea portion of the Channel Tunnel linking Britain and France). This will halve travel time between two of China's busiest ports, Ningbo and Shanghai, to about two hours. Shanghai itself is home to the current world-record holder for such a structure, the 32km Donghai bridge. This was opened less than three years ago to link the city with Yangshan port, now being built on two flattened islands. Yangshan is intended to be one of the world's biggest deep-water facilities when completed at some point after 2010.

From August the 115km journey from Beijing to Tianjin, its nearest port, will be reduced to half an hour with the inauguration of a bullet-train link, China's fastest intercity rail service. There are big plans for bullet trains. Work began in January on a 1,300km line between Beijing and Shanghai that, when completed in five years' time, will reduce rail time between the two cities from ten hours to five—and thus be a competitive alternative to flying.

At $30 billion, the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed line is the most expensive project in China's railway history. But with cash to spare the government, which is reportedly shouldering nearly 80% of the cost (with a consortium of insurance companies providing much of the rest), is pushing ahead after years of debate over what technology to use and how much to spend on it. By comparison China's construction of a conventional line (but the world's highest railway) from Golmud to the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, which was completed in 2006 amid much self-congratulation over its technological accomplishment, cost only $4 billion (or so officials said: infrastructure price tags are subject to little scrutiny in China and overruns are rarely reported publicly).

More prosaic but cumulatively no less remarkable projects abound. Fifteen years ago intercity travel was often a choice between slow, crowded trains or a perilous journey by car or bus on narrow rural roads (flying was for the privileged; until 1993 buying a plane ticket required a letter of authorisation from an employer). But since the 1990s China has built an expressway network criss-crossing the country that is second only to America's interstate highway system in length (see article). By the end of 2007, some 53,600km of toll expressways had been built. The pace of construction will now be slowing a bit, but the aim is to have 70,000km of expressways by 2020. The Ministry of Communications (which is responsible for roads) boasts that China's expressway builders achieved in 17 years what the West took 40 to accomplish.