I read an excellent article in the Feb 16-08 edition of The Economist detailing some of China’s infrastructure projects and they are impressive to say the least. Some extracts below:

…Beijing’s new airport terminal…The world’s largest, designed in the gently sinuous form of a Chinese dragon, it was planned and built in four years by an army of 50,000 workers…The terminal is 3km (1.8 miles) long. The floor space is 17% bigger than all the terminals at London’s Heathrow combined (including about-to-open Terminal Five)…Part of a $3.8 billion expansion, which included the opening of a third runway in October, it is due to open on February 29th, weeks ahead of schedule…Beijing badly needs to expand its handling capacity. In 2002 the airport ranked 26th in passenger numbers worldwide. Now it is the ninth busiest.

Between 2001 and the end of 2005 more was spent on roads, railways and other fixed assets than was spent in the previous 50 years. According to the state media, investment will see double-digit growth every year for the rest of the decade. Between 2006 and 2010, $200 billion is expected to be invested in railways alone, four times more than in the previous five years.

The world’s longest sea-crossing bridge is due to open in June: a 36km six-lane highway across Hangzhou Bay (about the same length as the undersea portion of the Channel Tunnel linking Britain and France). This will halve travel time between two of China’s busiest ports, Ningbo and Shanghai, to about two hours. Shanghai itself is home to the current world-record holder for such a structure, the 32km Donghai bridge. This was opened less than three years ago to link the city with Yangshan port…Yangshan is intended to be one of the world’s biggest deep-water facilities when completed at some point after 2010.

Since the 1990s China has built an expressway network criss-crossing the country that is second only to America’s interstate highway system in length. By the end of 2007, some 53,600km of toll expressways had been built. The pace of construction will now be slowing a bit, but the aim is to have 70,000km of expressways by 2020. The Ministry of Communications (which is responsible for roads) boasts that China’s expressway builders achieved in 17 years what the West took 40 to accomplish.

Investment in railways has been far slower to gather pace…Much of the south’s coal supply is sent by rail from northern mines to the coast and then loaded onto ships. The World Bank says that China’s railways carry 25% of the world’s railway traffic on just 6% of its track length.

This year’s target is $42 billion, compared with a total of $72 billion in the preceding five years. World Bank officials call it the biggest expansion of railway capacity undertaken by any country since the 19th century. China had 78,000km of track at the end of last year. The original plan, published in 2004, was to increase this to 100,000km by 2020. Last October this was revised to 120,000km (and officials now say the target will be met by 2015).

…railway expansion will bring down logistics costs, which…amount to 18% of GDP in China compared with 10% in America.

The increase in air passenger traffic has been dramatic: from 7m passengers in 1985 to over 185m in 2007. To deal with this rise, the government announced last month that it planned to add another 97 airports by 2020 to the 142 China had at the end of 2006. The number with an annual handling capacity of over 30m passengers will grow from three to 13.

There will also be a huge expansion of seaport capacity. The government predicts container throughput will increase by 85% between 2010 and 2020.

The article continues to discuss the obvious and large problems caused by such enormous projects. Imagine the issues from a proposed 150 km expressway between Beijing and Taipei!

I bring this article to your attention as it reminded me of a China Law Blog posting describing the logistics issues of shifting production from a more expensive China to lower cost emerging markets, specifically Vietnam. The posting discusses that regardless of the valuation of the Yuan, increasing labor and material costs that China remains the world’s manufacturing center and for good reason.

China’s investments today will definitely benefit the global trade community for many years to come and their global-standard infrastructure will impact the bottom lines of anyone conducting trade with the Mainland.