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发帖数: 4825 | 1 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/10/world/asia/china-bridges-infrastructure.
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CHISHI, China — Soaring over a lush valley in southern China, the Chishi
Bridge is a 1.4-mile-long marvel of concrete and steel. Four piers, like
graceful tuning forks as tall as skyscrapers, secure cables suspending a
four-lane expressway 610 feet 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 can. 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.
The eye-popping structures have slashed travel times in some areas, made
business easier and generated a sizable slice of the country’s economy,
laying a foundation, in theory at least, for decades of future growth.
But as the bridges and the expressways they span keep rising, critics say
construction has become an end unto itself. Fueled by government-backed
loans and urged on by the big construction companies and officials who
profit from them, many of the projects are piling up debt and breeding
corruption while producing questionable transportation benefits.
For all its splendor, the Chishi Bridge, in Hunan Province, exemplifies the
seamy underside of China’s infrastructure boom. Its cost, $300 million, was
more than 50 percent over the budget. The project struggled with delays and
a serious construction accident and was tarnished by government corruption.
Since it opened in October, the bridge and the expressway it serves have
been underused and buried in debt.
The cost of crossing the Chishi Bridge, about $3 and up depending on the
size of the vehicle, is already beyond the reach of most villagers who live
below it. Credit Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times
“Infrastructure is a double-edged sword,” said Atif Ansar, a management
professor at the University of Oxford who has studied China’s
infrastructure spending. “It’s good for the economy, but too much of this
is pernicious. ‘Build it and they will come’ is a dictum that doesn’t
work, especially in China, where there’s so much built already.”
A study that Mr. Ansar helped write said fewer than a third of the 65
Chinese highway and rail projects he examined were “genuinely economically
productive,” while the rest contributed more to debt than to transportation
needs. Unless such projects are reined in, the study warned, “poorly
managed infrastructure investments” could push the nation into financial
crisis.
In the country that built the Great Wall, major feats of infrastructure have
long been a point of pride. 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 that is part of the world’s
biggest water transfer project.
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.”
Indeed, the new roads and railways have proved popular, especially in
wealthier areas with many businesses and heavy commuter traffic. And even
empty infrastructure often has a way of eventually filling up, as early
critics of the country’s high-speed rail and the Pudong skyscrapers in
Shanghai have discovered.
But if the jury is still out on the bridges’ benefits, one can still admire
their engineering prowess.
The vertiginous Duge Beipan River Bridge, the world’s highest, vaults a 1,
853-foot-deep chasm in southwest China. On the Aizhai Bridge, drivers shoot
out of a tunnel to cross a 1,165-foot-deep gorge and then whiz straight into
another tunnel. The Qinglong railway bridge carries high-speed trains over
a graceful arch 968 feet above the Beipan River in Guizhou Province.
Clockwise from top left: the Jiaozhou Bay Bridge in Qingdao, in Shandong
Province; the Duge Beipan River Bridge, in Guizhou Province; the Aizhai
Bridge, in Hunan Province; the Beipan River Shanghai-Kunming high speed rail
bridge in Guanling Buyi and Miao Autonomous Prefecture in Anshun, a city in
southwest China’s Guizhou Province. Credit Xinhua; Getty Images; European
Pressphoto Agency; Associated Press
“The amount of high bridge construction in China is just insane,” said
Eric Sakowski, an American bridge enthusiast who runs a website on the world
’s highest bridges. “China’s opening, say, 50 high bridges a year, and
the whole of the rest of the world combined might be opening 10.”
Of the world’s 100 highest bridges, 81 are in China, including some
unfinished ones, according to Mr. Sakowski’s data. (The Chishi Bridge ranks
162nd.)
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 that connects Hong Kong and Macau with
mainland China.
The country’s expressway growth has been compared to that of the United
States in the 1950s, when the Interstate System of highways got underway,
but China is building at a remarkable clip. In 2016 alone, China added 26,
100 bridges on roads, including 363 “extra large” ones with an average
length of about a mile, government figures show.
China also devotes a much higher share of its economy to building
infrastructure than the West — about 9 percent versus about 2.5 percent in
the United States and Western Europe, according to the McKinsey Global
Institute.
A primary motive is economic growth: Infrastructure spending surged as part
of a huge stimulus program after the 2008 global financial crisis. Each
bridge can cost billions and employ hundreds of workers for several years.
But the endless construction has also created a self-perpetuating gravy
train, feeding corruption and distorting priorities.
Xingkang Bridge is under construction across the Luding River in Garze
Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in Sichuan. Credit Imaginechina, via
Associated Press
While experts often advocate infrastructure building as a path to economic
development, local governments in China “went overboard” because of
corruption and other financial lures, said Huang Shaoqing, an economist at
Shanghai Jiaotong University.
And as gleaming expressways and majestic bridges spread into less populated
areas, the cost-benefit ratio of each new mile of asphalt drops sharply.
The Chishi Bridge, for instance, promised “a fast and convenient access to
the sea” for southwestern China, a Hunan transportation official, Chen
Mingxian, said in 2010, shortly before construction began.
Promising that bridges and expressways could be Hunan’s road to riches, Mr.
Chen and other local officials quadrupled the province’s expressways, to 3
,778 miles by the end of last year, from 872 miles in 2005.
They were certainly roads to riches for Mr. Chen and his colleagues. In the
past six years, anticorruption inquiries have toppled more than 27 Hunan
transportation officials.
“In their jurisdiction, they were the emperors,” a party report said in
2014. “Officials in the provincial transportation office, high and low,
racked their brains for ways to get their claws into expressway projects.”
Mr. Chen, who had been lavished with official praise for his magnificent
bridges, was one of the biggest culprits. According to a party report
published last year, he and two underlings accepted about $4.4 million in
kickbacks for steering contracts on eight expressway projects to grateful
companies in just two years.
Villagers beneath the Chishi Bridge feel left behind, according to a local
official. Building second- or third-grade roads might benefit them more, a
resident said. Credit Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times
“Connections became a magic drug for scoring engineering contracts,” he
said, according to a party report in 2015. A court found him guilty of graft
, and he is likely to spend decades in prison.
The Chishi Bridge was among the tainted projects. But the bridge and
hundreds like it — overpriced, underused and sinking in debt — are
squeezing governments across China.
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 $47
billion in 2015, more than double the loss in 2014. In Hunan, expressways
faced interest payments of $1.9 billion a year while taking in $1.3 billion
in tolls, a deputy governor said in 2015.
But provincial officials say they are trapped. They cannot afford to lower
tolls to attract more drivers to the Chishi Bridge and the 70-mile
expressway it connects, but raising tolls would reduce traffic.
The price of crossing the bridge, about $3 and up depending on the size of
the vehicle, is beyond the reach of most villagers below. That toll is on
top of a higher toll for using the expressway.
“The capacity to repay loans with tolls is extremely weak, revenue cannot
cover the outlays on operation and management, and we have no capacity at
all to pay the interest and capital” on the construction loans, the Hunan
transportation office said in April, responding to a complaint from a local
official.
Thanks to government backing, the state-owned company building the bridge is
unlikely to default or go bankrupt. But bridges like Chishi leave local
governments and developers struggling with debt, and those who live below
nonplused.
“If you don’t build roads, there can’t be prosperity,” said Huang
Sanliang, a 56-year-old farmer who lives under the bridge. “But this is an
expressway, not a second- or third-grade road. One of those might be better
for us here.” | a*****e
发帖数: 159 | 2 酸的一塌糊涂。
老美修个东西也是贪污不少，还修的巨慢。 |
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