China’s bridges creak under debt
Critics outraged over signs of corruption, while government touts need for infrastructure
CHISHI, CHINA— Soaring over a lush valley in southern China, the Chishi Bridge is a 2.25-kilometre marvel of concrete and steel. Four piers, like graceful tuning forks as tall as skyscrapers, secure cables suspending a four-lane expressway 186 metres above fields of corn and rice.
Squinting up from a dirt road below, Gu Tianyong, a 66-year-old farmer, pondered the colossus, which is a shortcut linking southwestern China with the east coast.
“The government wouldn’t have built it if it was useless,” he said. “It does nothing for me, but must be useful for the country.”
The Chishi Bridge is one of hundreds of dazzling bridges erected across the country in recent years. Chinese officials celebrate them as proof that they can roll out infrastructure bigger, better and higher than any other country. China now boasts the world’s highest bridge, the longest bridge, the highest rail trestle and a host of other superlatives, often besting its own efforts.
But as the bridges and the expressways they span keep rising, critics say construction has become an end unto itself. Fuelled by governmentbacked loans and urged on by the big construction companies and officials who profit from them, many projects are piling up debt and breeding corruption while producing questionable transportation benefits. Leaders defend the infrastructure spree as crucial to China’s development.
“It’s very important to improve transport and other infrastructure so that impoverished regions can escape poverty and prosper,” President Xi Jinping said while visiting the spectacular, recently opened Aizhai Bridge in Hunan in 2013. “We must do more of this and keep supporting it.”
In 2016 alone, China added 26,100 bridges on roads, including 363 “extra large” ones with an average length of about 1.6 kilometres, government figures show. In all, China has accumulated more than 4,200 of these extra-large bridges.
The projects are often financed by loans from state-owned banks to companies owned by local governments, which collect tolls to repay the loans. But on many routes in less populous inland regions, tolls are not keeping pace with the costs, setting off a spiral of mounting debt and rising expenses.
The Chinese government estimated that expressways nationwide lost $63 billion in 2015, more than double the loss in 2014. In Hunan, expressways faced interest payments of $2.5 billion a year while taking in $1.75 billion in tolls, a deputy governor said in 2015.