China’s New Bridges: Rising High, but Buried in Debt -<br />China has built hundreds of dazzling new bridges, including the longest and highest, but many have fostered debt and corruption.<br />China also has the world’s longest bridge, the 102-mile Danyang-Kunshan Grand Bridge, a high-speed rail viaduct running parallel to the Yangtze River, and is nearing completion of the world’s longest sea bridge, a 14-mile cable-stay bridge skimming across the Pearl River Delta, part of a 22-mile bridge and tunnel crossing<br />that connects Hong Kong and Macau with mainland China.<br />“China’s opening, say, 50 high bridges a year, and the whole of the rest of the world combined might be opening 10.”<br />Of the world’s 100 highest bridges, 81 are in China, including some unfinished ones, according to Mr. Sakowski’s data.<br />China has produced engineering coups like the world’s highest railway, from Qinghai Province to Lhasa, Tibet; the world’s largest hydropower project, the Three Gorges Dam; and an 800-mile canal from the Yangtze River system to Beijing<br />that is part of the world’s biggest water transfer project.<br />“The amount of high bridge construction in China is just insane,” said Eric Sakowski,<br />an American bridge enthusiast who runs a website on the world’s highest bridges.<br />‘Build it and they will come’ is a dictum that doesn’t work, especially in China, where there’s so much built already.”<br />A study that Mr. Ansar helped write said fewer than a third of the 65 Chinese highway<br />and rail projects he examined were “genuinely economically productive,” while the rest contributed more to debt than to transportation needs.<br />While experts often advocate infrastructure building as a path to economic development, local governments in China “went overboard” because of corruption<br />and other financial lures, said Huang Shaoqing, an economist at Shanghai Jiaotong University.
