China will open the world’s tallest bridge this month, besting its own record with a structure that can fit almost two Eiffel Towers beneath it.
The Huajiang Grand Canyon Bridge in southwestern Guizhou, one of China’s poorest provinces, stands a staggering 2,050 feet above ground, making it almost twice the height of Paris’s landmark tower.
It stretches 9,481 feet end to end, according to Chinese state media — almost the length of the National Mall in Washington — and spans a deep ravine locally dubbed “earth’s crack.”
It is the latest feat of engineering that underscores China’s outsize infrastructure ambitions.
“The Communist Party believes in building enormous projects to boost the economy and burnish political prestige,” said Dan Wang, a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and the author of “Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future.”
The People’s Daily, the mouthpiece of China’s Communist Party, touted the bridge as a new “China miracle” that shows “Guizhou speed” and “Guizhou wisdom,” saying it characterizes a new stage in the country’s infrastructure development.
The bridge, under construction since 2022, passed a five-day load test late last month, state-run Xinhua News Agency reported, and is expected to open to traffic later this month. It will cut travel time across the Beipan River — between the counties of Guanling and Zhenfeng, which have a population of about 600,000 between them — from two hours to just two minutes.
The bridge is expected to bring in tourists: A transparent, 700-foot-tall observation lift will take visitors to a viewing tower atop the bridge, Chinese state broadcaster CCTV reported. The bridge also includes a half-mile-long glass path for pedestrians.
Li Mingshui, a civil engineering professor at Southwest Jiaotong University in Chengdu, who has advised local governments on the wind engineering and vibration control of major bridges, said strengthening transportation infrastructure is a key pillar in China’s regional development strategy.
“Unlike the U.S., which already has a highly developed highway system, many regions in western China remain poorly connected. What we are doing is to bridge those gaps and work on those weakest links,” Li said.
Local engineers have been describing their pride.
“Numerous bridge builders like me … are lucky to have caught up with the golden era of [China’s] traffic infrastructure boom,” Liu Hao, the project’s chief engineer, told Xinhua last month. Before Huajiang, the 42-year-old supervised the construction of six other mega bridges, almost all in Guizhou.
“When the Huajiang Canyon Bridge opens to traffic, I will definitely bring my daughter here to take a look and tell her proudly that ‘this is another mega project your dad and many other people have accomplished together,’” he said.
Engineers said they faced challenges including steep canyon slopes and powerful winds, and used a lighter arch design to cut the weight of the bridge by 30 percent.
China is home to a lot of record-breaking infrastructure: It already held the record for the world’s highest bridge, with the Beipanjiang Bridge, at 1,852 feet high, in 2016 displacing the Millau Viaduct in southern France for that title.
China is also home to the longest bridge spanning the open ocean, the 22-mile-long Hangzhou Bay Bridge in Zhejiang province.
But the dizzying pace of construction has also led to accidents. Last month, at least 12 workers were killed when a bridge under construction in the northwestern province of Qinghai collapsed, state media reported.
China has relied on huge state-backed infrastructure construction projects to spur growth, especially in inland regions, which have long lagged behind the prosperous coast.
China’s robust economic growth over the past four decades has been fueled by its infrastructure construction, McKinsey, the consultancy, said in a 2023 report. Much of this was financed by local governments, which has increasingly led to enormous levels of debt.
China’s leaders have promoted infrastructure as a backbone for its growth model.
President Xi Jinping has urged an “all-around” push for infrastructure to revive growth in the post-covid years. Last month, Premier Li Qiang stressed the need to “harness the exemplary and galvanizing role of megaprojects” to boost investment and domestic consumption.
Poor and inland provinces like Guizhou, a mountainous area near the border with Vietnam known for its dramatic karst landscape, have been the target of this effort as the central government has pushed a “strategic hinterland” strategy.
Despite its isolation and relative poverty, Guizhou — roughly the size of Missouri — boasts an extensive infrastructure network, with 11 airports, tall bridges and new roads.
These megaprojects are “not bridges to nowhere,” Li said, arguing that their long-term economic benefits will outweigh their construction costs.
But for Wang this approach reflects a different priority. “Rather than distributing funds to people for them to spend as they wish, officials in Beijing are much more keen to control resources to build monumental projects,” he said.
The news article feels a little “at what cost” typical Western media reporting on China, but the bridge is cool.
Socialist states build infrastructure at breakneck paces while the West builds jails and military installations and leaves civic infrastructure half built for years or decades. How did the West manage to win the Cold War, again?
a global campaign of murder, torture, and violence such as the world has never seen
[eyes copy of Killing Hope by William Blum]
True, true. I guess I’m stuck in the Space Race era, when it was a gentlemens’ scientific competition between countries, but what actually happened for the majority of the broader time period was a lot more violent on at least one country’s part.
Shit, even the JFK and LBJ were continuously scaling up US involvement in Vietnam by the day
The space race was also largely about making better missiles.
That is a good point. I just… definitely tend to cling to the modern Western narrative of the Space Race as a less overt and less hot point of the Cold War, as one of the few good things to have resulted from the war. Like, a lot of resources were wasted on proxy wars and flashy superweapon building throughout the entire Cold War era, but also, for a time, science in general with broader applications, and dick measuring that also produced necessary exploration and therefore useful data, was publicly funded by governments on all sides, and that was a good thing to result from a stupid conflict that shouldn’t have happened.