China enters our 1950s on road construction
Saturday, May 19, 2007 at 7:39AM FEATURE: “In China, It’s Not Always Clear for Whom the Booth Tolls,” by Jim Yardly, New York Times, 16 May 2007, p. A4.
Story is about the patchwork of tolls around China, which sound a bit feudal in their localism.
More interesting to me is the factoid buried within:
By 2020, if all goes as planned, China will have completed roughly 53,000 miles of expressways, a network roughly equivalent to the Interstate System in the United States. China considers expressways crucial to maintaining its economic growth and developing its western and interior provinces.
But since China’s trying to finance so much of it with tolls, it’s running into a lot of popular avoidance behavior--go figure.
That won’t stop until the differential in time lost is seen as so great as to justify the cost, and that will be an interesting process to watch.
Reader Comments (1)
The timeline for that, though, is a lot longer than 2020. One does not build a world class aerospace company in thirteen years, not matter how much money and how many technical graduates you pump out. The industry will take at least twenty years to develop, and another ten to start pumping out useful craft in useful quantities, so think more like 2040, to be optimistic.
Still, the plans are obvious-- China wants a unified geography, leading to a unified economy, just like the United States has. This is a rational, not inherently warlike goal for them to pursue. (For the extreme hawks, of course, a unified economy gives them the ability to develop a more comprehensive military, but it's far from the *only* thing it allows.)