Is China building too many airports?

Is China building too many airports? By Fran Wang. Caixin, Jun 23, 2017. http://www.caixinglobal.com/2017-06-23/101105028.html. Extract.

Over the next three years, local authorities in China are planning to build more than 900 airports for general aviation—the segment of the industry that includes crop dusting and tourism. The figure is nearly double the central government’s goal of “more than 500” over the period.

A news report has warned that’s just too many airports.

In May 2016, the State Council, China’s cabinet, announced that the country wanted to construct more than 500 general aviation airports to boost the size of the industry to over 1 trillion yuan (U.S.$146 billion).

General aviation covers flights on helicopters and light aircraft used in sectors such as tourism, agriculture, medical care, and disaster relief.

All provincial-level governments except Shanghai, Tibet, and the northeastern province of Jilin have since published their own plans for these airports, and their goal is far more ambitious than the central government’s. Together, they plan to build 934 general aviation airports, according to the 21st Century Business Herald.

The number put forward by each region ranges from seven to 200. The three places that intend to build the most general aviation airports are Guangxi in southern China, Heilongjiang in the northeast, and Xinjiang in the northwest—all remote and less developed areas, the newspaper said.

Despite the government excesses managing the public treasure*, corruption in civil engineering works†, etc.‡, the citizen is quite comfortable ¶ with these expenditures (while the costs are not recouped visibly from him). It seems that if we see more tower buildings, and are taller, we assume we are progressing, there is material advance, and that most are better for this. My hypothesis is that what feeds the population's approval are patriotism§ (very powerful in Han China) and redistributionism֍.




From Chris Buckley's China’s New Bridges: Rising High, but Buried in Debt, The New York Times, Jun 10, 2017. Available at https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/10/world/asia/china-bridges-infrastructure.html (impressive imagery).

*    “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.”

A study that Mr. Ansar helped write said fewer than a third of the 65 Chinese highway and rail projects he examined were “genuinely economically productive,” while the rest contributed more to debt than to transportation needs.

†  In the past six years, anticorruption inquiries have toppled more than 27 Hunan transportation officials.

‡, §   “The amount of high bridge construction in China is just insane,” said Eric Sakowski, an American bridge enthusiast who runs a website on the world’s highest bridges. “China’s opening, say, 50 high bridges a year, and the whole of the rest of the world combined might be opening 10.”

    Of the world’s 100 highest bridges, 81 are in China, including some unfinished ones, according to Mr. Sakowski’s data. (The Chishi Bridge ranks 162nd.)

    China also has the world’s longest bridge, the 102-mile Danyang-Kunshan Grand Bridge, a high-speed rail viaduct running parallel to the Yangtze River, and is nearing completion of the world’s longest sea bridge, a 14-mile cable-stay bridge skimming across the Pearl River Delta, part of a 22-mile bridge and tunnel crossing that connects Hong Kong and Macau with mainland China.

    The country’s expressway growth has been compared to that of the United States in the 1950s, when the Interstate System of highways got underway, but China is building at a remarkable clip. In 2016 alone, China added 26,100 bridges on roads, including 363 “extra large” ones with an average length of about a mile, government figures show.

֍    “It’s very important to improve transport and other infrastructure so that impoverished regions can escape poverty and prosper,” President Xi Jinping said while visiting the spectacular, recently opened Aizhai Bridge in Hunan in 2013. “We must do more of this and keep supporting it.”

¶    Indeed, the new roads and railways have proved popular.


§  Who Will Fight? The All-Volunteer Army after 9/11. By Susan Payne Carter, Alexander Smith & Carl Wojtaszek. American Economic Review, May 2017, Pages 415-419, https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.p20171082.