China's ambitious investment in public works
It’s much easier to spend money when you actually have it. The U.S. is sitting on a massive deficit, so we have to borrow to fund our stimulus program. China has cold, hard cash, and .
Guizhou province, in southwestern China, is a place of striking natural beauty: jagged peaks surrounded by fields of bright green rape, ridges slashed with limestone outcrops and plunging waterfalls. But these days the region’s grandest sight is man-made: the Baling River Bridge. Due to be completed early next year, this 1.4-mile (2.25 km) marvel of engineering is a jarringly conspicuous splash of 21st century technology amid Guizhou’s farms and rice fields, which haven’t changed much in thousands of years. It’s as if the Golden Gate Bridge had been dropped into some bucolic Middle-earth mountainscape.
Out of place as it may appear, this is no bridge to nowhere. Soaring a quarter-mile (400 m) above the Baling River, the $216 million span will reduce travel time considerably for the stream of trucks and cars traversing a highway that connects the provincial capital, Guiyang, with the nearest big city, Kunming, the capital of neighboring Yunnan province. Far from resenting the bridge as a white elephant, the residents of nearby Guanling, a one-stoplight town where the average income is less than $150 a year, view it as crucial to economic development and improvement in their lives. “I really cannot wait for the bridge to be completed,” says Yuan Bo, 25, a graphic designer who takes a two-hour bus ride every week from his home in Anshun to help in his family’s Guanling restaurant.
What’s good for Yuan Bo and Guanling is good for China. While the recession-racked West debates the wisdom of borrowing billions of dollars and spending it on economic stimulus, China is reaching into its vast financial reserves to launch one of the most ambitious and expensive public-works programs ever undertaken. The Baling River Bridge is only one of hundreds of infrastructure projects — ports, airports, bridges, schools, hospitals, highways, railroads — on which China plans to spend about $450 billion over the next several years. Announced in November, this pumped-up New Deal is aimed at more than cushioning China’s economic fall as the global recession bites deeply into the country’s manufacturing and export sectors. The new projects will make it much easier for commerce and people to move around China, hence stimulating domestic demand and reducing China’s economic reliance on exports, vital as rich world consumers rebuild their balance sheets and international trade contracts.
