China May Be Heading Down Road to Ruin

NINGBO, China —  The young lovers who climb to the top of Zhaobao Mountain in this scenic port city gaze out on a varied panorama. Rolling green hills to one side. A tranquil island offshore. And a massive white elephant directly below.

Officially, it’s known as Zhaobao Mountain Bridge, and it was scheduled to open in October. But a month shy of its debut, the 1 1/2-mile-long span started to quiver and sway. Inspectors soon discovered the cause: cracks in the bridge stemming from a design flaw.

Workers who spent months erecting the concrete-and-steel structure have been forced to tear part of it down while engineers literally go back to the drawing board. The project’s completion date has been postponed, and its hefty price tag--$52 million--is sure to increase. For now, the span sits like a broken hyphen over the muddy Yong River, a monument to bad planning.

As an isolated instance, Zhaobao Mountain Bridge would be embarrassing enough. But as the government goes on a mammoth, $1.2-trillion spending spree to jump-start the faltering economy, hundreds of bridges, roads and airports are being thrown up across China with startling speed--and, in many cases, with a notable lack of attention to quality.

Slapdash Construction Riddles Projects

Rampant corruption and slapdash construction have riddled infrastructure projects throughout the country. A highway in southwestern China fell apart less than three weeks after it opened. Embezzlement and poor craftsmanship have even plagued the mother of all public works sites, the Three Gorges Dam, according to unusually frank reports in the Chinese media recently.

Beyond the threat of derailing the central government’s economic stimulus program, such unscrupulous practices may have more dire consequences, the Communist regime fears.

In January, two bridge collapses in different areas of China killed 47 people and injured more than 30 others. In both cases, authorities arrested project officials, including one local Communist Party boss, on suspicion of graft or using shoddy materials.

In a year when they are emphasizing social stability, China’s leaders fret that such incidents may inflame popular anger against a government already creaking under the strains of swelling urban unemployment and rural discontent.

Corruption already ranks as the No. 1 grievance of ordinary Chinese. Mindful of the public mood, Premier Zhu Rongji told a top-level meeting on construction safety last month that anyone caught skimming funds or skimping on quality should be severely punished.

“Otherwise, we shall become people condemned by history,” Zhu warned his listeners, according to the official New China News Agency. “Poor construction quality will bring calamity to the country and the people and will entail untold troubles.”

Zhu’s speech was an attempt to keep China’s ambitious, Keynesian spending program on track less than a year after it began. As the country’s economic czar, Zhu is the chief architect of the plan to invest $1.2 trillion in infrastructure over three years. Beijing is depending on the spending to make up for dwindling private consumption in the wake of the Asian financial crisis.

“Last year, without this kind of stimulation, China could not have achieved 8% [growth],” said Hu Biliang, senior economist at a French securities firm in the Chinese capital. The rate would have been 5% or less, Hu estimates.

This year, “[even] more support is necessary from the state investment budget to support the economy,” Hu said.

But the spectacular failure of several projects, some of them begun before the stimulus program was unveiled, has dampened popular enthusiasm for more large-scale public works schemes.

On Jan. 4, as villagers bustled across a small but busy footbridge in a rural neighborhood of Chongqing city in central China, the structure came crashing down in a heap of bodies and rubble. Rescue crews recovered the bodies of at least 40 people.

Outrage over the accident reverberated across the country. It grew after an investigation showed that the bridge’s contractor had built other faulty spans in the area but had never been brought to heel. A welder who worked on the fallen bridge came forward to say that he had repeatedly tried to report the use of defective materials.

Worse, a local Communist Party cadre--a former classmate of the contractor--admitted to taking $12,000 in bribes in connection with the project, which mysteriously managed to go over budget by 40% despite its flawed execution.

Local party bosses reportedly tried to impose a gag order on cadres to minimize the bad press. “Before liberation, I was an underground party member,” one official told the Southern Weekend newspaper, referring to the Communist takeover of 1949. “Now, I am still working underground.”

Less than a week after the Chongqing collapse, a bridge in Fujian province also crumbled, killing seven people. The foreman in charge of its construction has been arrested for allegedly ignoring warnings that the structure was dangerous.

The two high-profile collapses led even the normally ponderous New China News Agency to acknowledge that “an alarm” had been sounded about careless construction. The central Ministry of Construction issued an emergency notice exhorting local authorities to “learn from the bloody lessons” of the accidents and inspect all large projects of the past five years, the news agency reported.

Such jerry-building is not confined to bridges. Fanfare greeted the opening last spring of a 43-mile highway in Yunnan province in southwestern China, a $46-million poverty-relief project designed to connect a poor area with the provincial capital, Kunming.

But authorities had to shut down the road just 18 days later when sections began to buckle, potholes opened up and rubbish was found as filler inside supposedly solid concrete barrier walls. Investigators uncovered evidence of widespread corruption and slipshod workmanship, including the hiring of unqualified contractors and the use of substandard cement.

Forging Ahead Despite Concerns

Despite heightened public wariness of more big-scale infrastructure projects, few economists expect the central government to back off from its heavily promoted economic game plan. “I don’t think they’ll change their ideas about stimulating demand,” economist Hu said of the Beijing leadership.

Here in Ningbo, officials have dived into the scramble for infrastructure investment with a vengeance. Once a prosperous ancient port hemmed in by dozens of tiny islands, the city slowly bled much of its trade and dynamism to its northern neighbor, Shanghai. Now it’s aiming to recover some of its pride by installing a vast network of bridges and expressways to improve transport within the city and link Ningbo with surrounding areas, including Shanghai.

In the past five years, the city has sunk $1.2 billion into building at least five highways, a local railway line and an expanded airport. Its most ambitious proposal--and the most dubious-sounding--is the $677-million “Peninsula Project,” comprising 20 miles’ worth of sea-crossing spans to hook up the mainland with some of the islands of the offshore archipelago.

But the Zhaobao Mountain Bridge debacle now serves as a grim reality check for such dreams.

Everything seemed to be going fine until the evening of Sept. 24, when the bridge abruptly started to dance because of cracks in two separate sections. Inspectors subsequently blamed the problems on inexperienced designers who did not properly calculate the stress support necessary for such a large structure.

In October, Ningbo’s vice mayor was kicked out of office in a murky corruption and bribery scandal reportedly involving 40 officials. No details of the imbroglio have been publicized, and few residents here appear to know anything about either the brewing scandal or the embarrassing bridge setbacks.

Zhou Zhilian, general manager of the state-owned Xingye Bridge-Building Co., the main contractor on the project, rejected suggestions that the failure of the bridge might be related to the corruption probe. He accused journalists of sensational reporting. He also dismissed accusations that the span was unsafe.

For now, the dismantling of the bridge is proceeding slowly. From the Zhaobao Mountain lookout, workers in yellow hard hats can be seen scurrying on a portion of the span that comes tantalizingly close to connecting with the mountain before breaking off into thin air. An engineer familiar with the project said it is unclear how much will have to be torn down--or how much more money will be needed to make the bridge usable.

Blueprints for reworking the bridge are due in mid-March. But this time, no one is predicting an opening date.