But who is going to pay the bill?
Nestled deep in the mountainous southwestern corner of China, Guizhou Province is home to over 38 million people. With an area of just a shade over 68,000 square miles, Guizhou is roughly a quarter the size of Texas. Its GDP of $258 billion makes it one of the poorest and least densely populated places in all of China. Many of Guizhou’s residents live in rural, primitive villages and settlements with minimal industrial development.
So it comes as somewhat of a surprise that Guizhou is home to half of the 10 tallest bridges in the entire world and 40 of the top 100.
The mountainous province, with its bountiful natural resources like coal, timber and other metals is ripe for economic development. With its potential for developing renewable energy sources and open land, Guizhou has also emerged as a hotspot for data center development. To tap these abundant resources, however, Guizhou needed to connect itself to the rest of China.
Doing so would prove to be an extremely ambitious undertaking, as much of the province is divided by deep canyons and river valleys. Creating a modern transportation network in Guizhou would require dozens of bridges spanning chasms and rivers nearly 2,000 feet below the bridge deck. For reference, the highest bridge in the United States is the Mike O’Callaghan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge over the Colorado River between Arizona and Nevada at a pedestrian 890 feet. Guizhou has 17 bridges that are taller.
“The amount of high bridge construction in China is just insane,” said Eric Sakowski, an American bridge fan who runs a website dedicated to the tallest bridges in the world. “China’s opening, say, 50 high bridges a year, and the whole of the rest of the world combined might be opening 10.”
All of this begs the question—how? How has Guizhou emerged as the mega-bridge construction capital of the world?
The Bridges
The bridges in Guizhou run the gamut from suspension and cable-stayed bridges to steel arches or concrete beam bridges with massive piers. Not only are the bridges tall, but their spans are also long, with suspended spans over 2,500 feet in length. The approach spans to the main structure unit also tower above the valleys, creating stunning columns that loom over the ground below. The bridges are a sight to behold, as much as the mountains and valleys they span.
Guizhou’s bridge building boom kicked off in 2001 with the construction of what was the world’s highest railway bridge. Roadway bridges came next, with the opening of the Guanxing Highway Bridge over the Beipan River. It was the highest bridge in the world when it opened at 1,273 feet, though it is currently the 11th highest. The Guanxing Bridge was the first suspension bridge in the world to exceed the height of the Royal Gorge Bridge in Colorado. The Liuchehe Bridge and Guniuhe Bridge are the tallest steel arch bridges in the world and the only two that are taller than 400 meters.
For a few more years, the Duge Bridge over the Beipan River will hold the title of world’s highest bridge at 1,854 feet above the valley below. By 2025, that title will shift to another new bridge in Guizhou, the Huajiang Grand Canyon Bridge, which is expected to have a height of over 2,050 feet. The bridge’s piers were capped in November. When the project is completed, the bridge will open a new route that allows drivers to cross the canyon in under a minute—a journey that used to take over an hour.
The process of constructing these massive bridges has been turned into a fine-tuned process by Chinese engineers and workers, with some going up in under 3 years. Utilizing precast elements and orthotropic deck pieces and steel truss running plates allows the deck to be assembled quickly and connected to its suspender cables. It is worth noting that many of the bridges bear a striking resemblance to each other, so despite the extreme terrain and height, there is an element of standardization at play that helps constructability. Earthwork is also limited at the bridges by constructing long, tall approach spans that are also several hundred feet above the ground below. These spans are just as interesting from a bridge engineer’s perspective, as the Chinese have developed a method of trucking in massive concrete beams and deck pieces and dropping them into place from hundreds of feet in the air.
As an American bridge engineer, I can’t help but marvel at the construction methods employed by Chinese engineers and contractors. There isn’t much impetus to build bridges like this in our country, where our transportation infrastructure is already well established and there remain no big regions that are neglected. If there is a resource-rich area in the United States, there are already roads and bridges connecting it to the interstate highway system. Thanks to its abundant natural resources, mild climate and terrain, Guizhou couldn’t be a more perfect playground for a civil engineer. It is a region begging to be developed, and the only way to unlock its potential is to build roads and bridges across canyons and cliffs.
Opening Guizhou for Business
In 2012, Guizhou was one of the most underdeveloped provinces in all of China. Its per capita GDP of $2,800 made it one of the poorest in the country. The region, however, is not without resources and economic potential. It was during this time that the Chinese government made the decision to inject billions of dollars into developing a highway network in Guizhou.
In 2009, Guizhou started to insert itself into the list of world’s tallest bridges. Since then, there is no other place in the world where bridges this massive have gone up this rapidly. The scale of the ambition in the province is unmatched. In 2017, Governor Sun Zhigang set a goal of building 10,000 km (~6,200 miles) of highway by 2020. For reference, all of France has 8,600 km of highway. The governor’s vision to connect every village by bridge or highway would cut travel times across vast valleys and mountain ranges from hours to minutes.
Liu Hao, a bridge engineer working for the Huajiang Valley Bridge, said, “Imagine how it was without the bridge. We had to go along the twisting mountain road to transport fresh local products. It took a day, and the products would all rot on the way.”
In addition to creating avenues for commerce with the rest of China, the bridges in Guizhou have turned the region into a tourist destination. Upwards of 700,000 people visit the province each year to view and tour the bridges. There is also a museum showcasing the engineering and technology behind the bridges. The most adventurous tourists are even able to base jump on the Baling River Bridge.
Whose Turn to Pay?
For a bridge engineer anywhere in the world, these towering, elegant bridges represent the state of the art. But for others, they raise a question. How the heck are they going to pay for these things? Although it’s true that there are some differences in construction costs between the United States with its capitalist, unionized, worker’s rights and Communist China, building over 50 of the world’s tallest bridges in a decade is going to come at a steep, steep price. Who will pay the bill?
“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.”
Tolling the bridges would theoretically allow Guizhou to pay off the mountains of debt and government-backed bonds that were taken on to pay for the bridges and highways. And what a mountain of debt it is. Guizhou had $388 billion in outstanding debt at the end of fiscal year 2022. The government-backed contractor responsible for the Duge Bridge and 22 other bridges in the top 100 highest is approaching $800 million in annual interest payments on its debt. Another contractor will be making interest-only payments on its $2 billion in debt over the next 10 years. The debt in Guizhou is a ticking time bomb. The tolls and rise in GDP simply won’t offset an avalanche of interest payments, especially as central banks are forced to raise interest rates to tame inflation.
Build It and They Will they Come?
The reason why most mountainous regions in the rest of the world are not traversed by dozens of suspension bridges is simple—there are no vehicles to use them. No traffic model can justify Guizhou’s ranking in the top five in China for total highway miles.
It’s the classic chicken or egg story. But do there have to be so many big chickens?
“If you don’t build roads, there can’t be prosperity,” said Huang Sanliang, a 56-year-old farmer from Hunan Province, another rural province experiencing a bridge-building boom. “But this is an expressway, not a second- or third-grade road. One of those might be better for us here.”
However, you can’t turn back the clock. The bridge construction boom in rural China cannot be undone. Now it remains for the government to backstop the debt to prevent default and financial ruin in the very province that it sought to enrich.
