Postcard From China - Construction and Development

Postcard From China - Construction and Development

With jack hammers ringing late into the night and cranes lining the skyline, you are never far from a construction site in 21st century China. But is all this construction evidence of a concerted effort to develop essential infrastructure needs or future concrete tombstones marking the failure of grand ambitions ?

Mao Zedong, the Great Chinese leader once said that you are not a man until you have walked the Great Wall. Heeding such noble words, thousands of tourists head daily to sections of the Wall north of Beijing and most are quick to exclaim that rarely has a tourist attraction been given a more appropriate name.



Great Wall of China at Bandaling

The Great Wall of China is a world treasure and traverses over 6500 km from the sea in the east, over mountains in the north, to the deserts in the west. The Wall has its origins in smaller walls built by leaders of various cities 2000 years ago to protect themselves from marauding hordes. These Walls were then linked by a succession of Emperors most notably those in the Ming Dynasties in an attempt to keep out the roaming Mongol invaders. They reportedly ‘employed’ over 1,000,000 workers who laboured arduously for 200 years to help block entry to the Forbidden City (Beijing) in the 1400’s.

The Great Wall’s ambition and daring would be deserving of our praise and plaudits if it were built today, let alone 600 years ago. Standing upon the wide lanes atop the 10 foot walls, it is hard to determine whether to be more impressed by the imposing height and comfortable width of the Wall, its mind numbing length, or its incredible path though truly mountainous territory. However for this wide eyed traveller, the most stupendous aspect of the Great Wall is that mortal men had the temerity to consider building it at all !

We pondered such thoughts as we drove back to Beijing and couldn’t help but be struck by the commonalities with China today. The huge outpouring of concrete today illustrates that today’s Chinese leaders obviously share much of the same DNA of the great Emperors of times past. Any and all problems associated with Chinese growth seem to be tackled with another gigantic construction project.

The Three Gorges Dam is of course the most famous example of this ‘giganticism’ streak. It has been variously denoted by some commentators as ‘the biggest construction project since the Great Wall’, or the ‘answer to China’s energy needs’ or by other less charitable observers as ‘the most environmentally and socially destructive project in the world.” If built according to plan, it will be the largest dam in the world, submerging 13 cities, 140 towns, 1,352 villages and require the resettlement of 1.9 million people. It will bury an estimated 10,000 important archeological sites some of which almost certainly contain priceless information about the history of man (the Peking Man found in China in 1937 is considered one of the most important finds of all time linking our ancestors, the homo erectus and homo sapiens species). The potential upside is that its 26 x 700MW generators will greatly assist in providing the electricity to power the nation while reducing its unhealthy reliance on heavily polluting coal-fired stations. It will also help temper the Yangtze’s common and frequently deadly floods.



Three gorges dam, Yangtze River, China

But other examples abound of China’s building fetish. Our very first experience of China was flying into the brand new Pudong airport completed in 1999. The cavernous new terminal with over 200 gates already has capacity to handle 126,000 flights and 4 million passengers annually. Yet this terminal is but one of FOUR planned for the airport by 2020. It is served by a modern scientific marvel, the world’s only commercial Maglev train which transports new arrivals the barely 30km to the city in about 9 minutes reaching speeds of 431 kph. Entirely inappropriate yet great fun !



“Even faster than my Audi !”

Shanghai also obviously harbours (if you will excuse the pun) a deep desire to be the next Hong Kong as the central hub of shipping throughout the Asian sphere. There is the small issue of Shanghai, which is basically a delta, not possessing a deep water port. Geography obviously should not stand in the way of such important aspirations and so work has begun on a deep water port 31.5km offshore ! It will be served by the worlds longest causeway carrying six lanes each direction. With no rail link, it is difficult to see how this sits alongside China’s determination to reduce its rapidly escalating consumption of petrol and diesel.



Scale model of Shanghai deep water port

Perhaps the most impressive example we saw was the rapid transformation of the Pudong area across the Huangpu River from the Bund. An area made up of nothing but low level residential housing and the odd park 15 years ago has been rapidly transformed into an astounding collection of world class office towers, convention centres and super malls with more to come.



Pudong as viewed from the Bund 1990 Pudong as viewed from the Bund 2004

Similarly there is an absolutely massive effort by the Government to build better accomodation for its workers. We only needed to open the hotel windows to get a view of this activity (see below). In Shanghai alone, 16.2m square metres of housing has been built, much of it replacing shabby and dilipadated buildings. Building sites routinely have eight to ten cranes building the next set of 30 storey residential housing blocks. We heard reports that Shanghai will soon have over 6,500 buildings more than 100m tall.



View from Hotel in Beijing Eight cranes on one site in Beijing

The construction effort thus stands as the most visible example of the Chinese economic growth miracle. Simply put, some of the construction and development is fabulously impressive and almost certainly an essential requirement to cope with a nation growing its already large economy at 9% per year. However, we couldn’t escape the feeling that the construction industry was becoming ‘too big to fail’. A commentator we spoke to noted that it now accounts for 10% of the GDP of China. While not a large employer per se, there certainly seemed an awful lot of labourers reprising their forefathers efforts by helping to construct great buildings one shovel load at a time. How long can such unskilled workers sustain a modest lifestyle in what is becoming a quite expensive city ?

Perhaps the Great Wall of China provides a timely reminder. It sits atop the mountain ranges serving out its time as nothing more than a tourist attraction, its noble and glorious raison d’etre as the last line of resistance against marauding Mongols eroding day by day. Will some of the modern Chinese construction wonders of today share a similar fate as long standing monuments to dreams in tatters ? History shows that the Great Wall of China failed to protect Beijing. Genghis Khan simply bribed the guards before ransacking the Forbidden City. In a bizarre coincidence that only history can provide, the Three Gorges dam is similarly plagued by accusations of corruption on a massive scale. History, according to Split Enz, never repeats but it certainly rhymes.