Beipanjiang Bridge, suspended 565m above China’s south-west mountains [video]

I'm an American and I understand too. We are living through the decades where America gave away its leadership in the world. We can't get anything accomplished at a reasonable price in reasonable time.

For example, China built 14,000 miles of high-speed rail in about 15 years, with another 10,000 on the way. In America we still haven't built our first line. Every time the discussion comes up, it degenerates into people explaining all the places it won't work.

Not to worry for India, in 50 years it will be better off than today. It might even pass the US.

I'm from Germany, often considered the country of quality engineering and just look at our airport: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Brandenburg_Airport#Del...

tl;dr: Planned to open in 2011, it's still in construction with some say it won't open before 2020.

Maybe it's more likely a competition between 2 different democracies as opposed to authoritarian vs democracy which main stream media often sell to public. Let me explain.

Contrary to most western audience's belief, Democracy is also a value promoted by CPP , at least literally. But the meaning of democracy is quite different. The one in India focus on equal voting from everybody , in China such practice is only gradually implemented in some area recently, but what CPP emphasize more is collective decision making by a group of participants not a dominant chief officer.

As to select policy maker/politician , Chinese system evolved to a very different systematic procedure with some democracy factors (i.e. selected by vote, but not by average people). See a TED speech:

https://www.ted.com/talks/eric_x_li_a_tale_of_two_political_...

The consequence of the difference is "democratically elected" policy makers are good story tellers finally win the voters . Usually they are former Lawyer, Journalist who are very good at articulating and performing to gain higher votes, live in their own alternative reality sometime lead to war. As a comparison, typical Chinese officials are usually not so good looking , even can not speak fluently without a speech note, more likely trained as engineers with better understanding facts , less influenced by ideology. But they are in that position for a better reason: They have some track record of accomplishment.

From Machine learning point of view, India democracy looks like a simple one layer Perceptron with equal weights on all inputs, Chinese "democracy" is a forward feed neural network with a very small hidden layer with the weights somehow adjusted.

Good luck to India people.

I've often wondered about India's remarkable lack of progress compared to China. I would be interested in reading more about the causes.

Ditto; great video. Got to love such great feats of engineering.

The infrastructure projects alone are fascinating to me. It's like traveling back in time to witness Eisenhower's interstate highways going up in the 1960s, only bigger and better.

> that guy speaks Chinese like an excited teenager

So, in the modern American documentary interview style even when everyone's speaking English, then?

> For anybody young and commitment free (or even just commitment free), you should go there.

Are there english speaking startups one could work at? Are work-permit requirements doable?

He might have lived there in country a while and simply copying a popular style of light reporting. It's not unusual.

Unfortunately, while the Chinese people are fantastic, the most recent round of government repression has made it extremely difficult to live and do business there as a foreigner- and of course, the very air is frequently poisonous.

It is unsustainable long-term, but it's a reasonable model to follow. Build today while the cost is cheaper, create a larger general economy and then coast for a while. Japan also spent decades boosting GDP with huge infrastructure projects. They can't sustain them anymore and in some areas are starting to dismantle some of the excess but the Japan of today is much nicer place to have a flat economy than the Japan of the 40s or 50s.

Does it take into account the benefits of developing large scale engineering and construction expertise?

In many ways the United States Apollo program was also a white elephant as a space program of that scale was economically unsustainable, however, it had a huge impact on accelerating pace of technology development.

http://www.computerworld.com/article/2525898/app-development...

Suspension bridge cables are made of smaller cables. And those smaller cables are made of yet smaller cables. For example: http://regex.info/i/JEF_042406.jpg

That's my guess.

It seemed to me that he was interjecting with arbitrary comments, just to show off that he speaks Chinese. I didn't think it added to the video at all.

I thought the same and then was less impressed realising he was Australian.

I came here to say this too.

All to often TV has an interpreter and is editing together to make the interviewer seem like they understand. Even worse, the interviewer reads the question in English and then the interviewee responds in the native language, clearly having been told the question already.

It's wonderful to see people having a normal interaction in a language that isn't English.

Lots of people are saying he's from the BBC, but is he?

The video is a "Lion Television / All3 Media production for JSBC"

Lion Television is a UK TV production company.

All3 Media are "content creators".

JSBC is Jiangsu Broadcasting Corporation.

So, I don't know if we can say anything about the BBC from that interviewer.

We can say the BBC have many foreign correspondents (although their have been drastic cuts), who spend long times in the countries they report on. When you hear reports from foreign correspondents (eg, BBC radio 4's "Letter From Our Own Correspondent") you'll hear them speaking non-English languages and providing a translation.

Complaints about cuts to the foreign correspondents: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2011/oct/21/bbc-foreign-co...

From Our Own Correspondent page, with many downloadable podcasts: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qjlq

Yeah, let's be snarky, one bridge collapse during construction means the whole country cannot build a decent bridge.

Some of the longest and most used suspension bridges are in China, and they've been in use for years in major cities like Shanghai.

Here is a list of the longest cable-stayed bridges in the world, look at how many of them are in China:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest_cable-stayed_b...

No particular insight here, but the bridges and the new roads are all part of the Chinese infrastructure initiative. Besides the new towns being built to replace old ones you also have whole road networks and bridges being built to connect the country. The area where this bridge is consists of mountain after mountain and driving through theee giants is pretty impressive. Same goes for train routes: also over bridges over mountains, through mountains etc. If you look left and right there are NO traditional old buildings, even though it is clearly rice and potatoe farmers you are looking at. And they all have new cars. Working the fields by hand but a car they have...

I don't think you can categorize each bridge for its commercial or strategic value. Before it took you X hours to get from location Y to Z now it is less. It's not about connecting two potatoe farmers it is about connecting the county and modernizing its infrastructure.

The purpose of all the infrastructure projects in the periphery is to tie China together, allow economic opportunities in the periphery, and promote trade, travel and migration between different parts of China.

To grossly simplify it, China is a lot less of a single nation than it claims to be. Historically, it was a collection of states that were bound together into a single empire, but most places still retained local identity over the imperial one, and most Chinese dynasties failed not because external pressures were raised to insurmountable level, but rather because the thin fabric tying the states together fell apart and the empire just disintegrated.

The CPC sees this, not any external threat or national level domestic challenger, as the primary threat and problem facing them in the future. To fix it, they employ a policy of trying to integrate the periphery by building infrastructure in such a way to make it easier to travel between provinces than it is to travel inside provinces, so that new economic structures arise which make the people in one province dependent on people in other provinces, and so that travel and marriage of people across the provinces would in the long term make the distinctions fade away.

The news needs highest/longest/fastest hence the story.

This is just one of many bridges with remarkably similar construction. It looks like the Chinese have mastered how to put massive bridges wherever needed on schedule and to budget. They are building an interstate highway system and high speed rail out across the whole country, not letting the mountains get in the way. With the exception of ridiculously wealthy oil states, expect China to have the best roads soon.

For a reasonably direct comparison this is like a bridge on a US interstate. The US has 4,000,000+ miles of roads and only has 46,876 miles of interstate, but those interstates are extremely valuable national infrastructure as they significantly reduce long distance transportation costs.

So sure locals can benefit, but that's a side effect.

Good transportation opens the way to an improved economy.

One of China's strategic goals is to rely more and more on internal demand for the products it manufactures, rather than on export markets.

That is only possible if regions are well connected, and is part of the reason the Chinese government is spending billions of dollars on highways, high-speed rail, tunnels, bridges and more.

Several years back I remember reading a statistic that for some products (I think it was flat screen TVs) that are produced in the south west of China, it was costlier in both time and money to transport the finished goods from the factory to Shanghai (a major port city) than it was to then ship them from Shanghai to the US.

Notice how there was basically no traffic on it.

Not sure how sustainable it is over 50 years. The US did this 50 years ago. We made miles and miles and miles of highways. The the burbs did this 20 years ago. We build miles and miles of road to each and every house, even if the road gets 20 cars a day.

We are starting to pay the price now, as the maintenance bills come due. The federal gov't paid for the building, but the local is responsible for most of the repair. We can't afford to maintain them.

I do not know the lifespan of this bridge. 50, 75 years? At some point some repairs will be due, and it might cost a lot...