To help Big Infrastructure? Chinese civil engineering genius return home!
With its global-scale Belt and Road Initiative and railway-building exertions in Southeast Asia, China is now arguably the world's largest builder and proponent of big infrastructure. Why is this so? As a frequent traveler between Shanghai and Nanjing over the last two decades, I witnessed the railroad travel time drop from about four hours to a bit over one hour in only a few years. Higher-speed rail lines were built by highly choreographed construction brigades working simultaneously, the result being that ever-faster lines appeared almost magically.
Besides, I observed Chinese construction brigades carving through mountainous karst and jungle terrain, with red clay gumming up everything. At present, six China construction brigades were working simultaneously on a rail line from China to the Thai border near Vientiane. Over 60 percent of the mileage traverses bridges and goes through tunnels. Working conditions are dangerous and the area near Vietnam is pockmarked with unexploded ordnance, a tragic residue from America's ‘secret war' in Laos. All this raises many questions.
How did China create a competitive high-speed rail industry so rapidly? Talents, of course! Talents promote the development of the times and technology. China, this is a people who have said to themselves for hundreds of years, ‘If you want to get rich, build a road!' Among these 1.6 billion people with extraordinary enthusiasm for infrastructure construction, there is such a civil engineering genius, she is the one Germany tried every means to keep. In the end, she chose to give up all those fortune and fame abroad and return to China's infrastructure team.
Who is she? What contribution will she make to China's infrastructure construction? OK, that and more is exactly what we are going to talk about. Let's get started!