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

http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20170531-chinas-impossible-engineering-feat

by mudil • 9 years ago

169 99 9 years ago

bbc.com

markdown2• 9 years ago

[Cough](http://edition.cnn.com/2017/07/03/africa/kenya-bridge-collap...)

That's a beautiful bridge though.

Cookingboy2• 9 years ago

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...

markdown2• 9 years ago

I don't need to be sold on China and their incredible achievements. Have visited, enjoyed my time there.

It was meant as lighthearted snark, since the bridge collapse only just happened a few days ago. I'm sorry it didn't come across right.

prawn• 9 years ago

Seriously impressive bridge.

(It's a video a few minutes long and worth watching. I rarely watch videos on news sites, but glad I watched this one.)

sundvor• 9 years ago

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

NaliSauce• 9 years ago

I find it fascinating that (pressure) grouting is shown as something revolutionary and new here.

iUsedToCode• 9 years ago

I like how the reporter speaks Chinese. Usually it's english only, which i suppose is translated off screen for the local being interviewed.

I don't watch much BBC so i don't know if that changed lately. It's a change for the better imo.

jstanley• 9 years ago

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.

tsukaisute3• 9 years ago

Chinese speaker here. His comments were all over-the-top excited, repeating and exaggerating others' words, almost like mocking the Chinese staff (see around 2:20 mark for example.) Think Borat-speak. Seemed very strange and unfit for this otherwise good piece.

london8882• 9 years ago

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

laurieg• 9 years ago

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.

DanBC• 9 years ago

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

zokier• 9 years ago

There is very little provided for the reason for building the bridge. Doing a massive construction project so that some potato farmer can carry his goods to neighboring village seems unwarranted. Is there some industry or something that can use the bridge, or maybe it has some strategic value?

moontear2• 9 years ago

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.

seanmcdirmid3• 9 years ago

These bridges are almost always tolled on express ways. If the potato farmer below doesn't (or can't) pay the toll, then they aren't going to use the bridge. More to the point, this bridge is better for thru traffic and has very little to do with the potato farmer.

A comment made in an a recent NYT article on these new Chinese bridges: https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/06/10/world/asia/china-bridg...

"If you don’t build roads, there can’t be prosperity,” said Huang Sanliang, a 56-year-old farmer who lives under the bridge. “But this is an expressway, not a second- or third-grade road. One of those might be better for us here.”

Expressways are sexy and useful if you are driving thru. But...I have the feeling they are overbuilding it in many places while not caring much about the less sexy roads that might improve local lives more. But then, such roads would never be talked about abroad and wouldn't do much for China's prestige (and therefore the official's in charge promotion).

The cars on the expressway have little bearing on the farmers below it. A rice farmer isn't going to be driving a new Audi or even a Toyota, even in rich Zhejiang, but definitely not in guizhou or Hunan.

mkstowegnv• 9 years ago

The "New River Gorge Bridge was for many years the world's longest single-span arch bridge; it is now the third longest" is similarly in the middle of nowhere in West Virginia and was even more so when it was completed in 1977.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_River_Gorge_Bridge

Tuna-Fish• 9 years ago

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.

mistermann6• 9 years ago

China bashers often talk about things like how much abject poverty or wealth inequality there still is, or their demographic problems, or malinvestment. Sure, these are problematic, but if you use a little imagination, initiatives like this maybe don't look so dumb.

I think Chinese political and economic leadership is absolutely world class and may some day be viewed by historians as the best the world has ever seen, especially if you consider both the breadth and speed of their accomplishments.

Theodores• 9 years ago

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.

Retric• 9 years ago

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.

imron• 9 years ago

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.

dmoy2• 9 years ago

The other half of that is after you truck it to a store in Shanghai, it's more expensive for the end user to buy (tax on electronics), despite incomes being like 1/5th.

brianwawok• 9 years ago

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...

yuan• 9 years ago

The reporter said the video was taken before it opened, so of course there was no traffic. It's pretty busy a few months later as shown in this video: https://youtu.be/YOkW2h2HTD8

moontear2• 9 years ago

Really impressive bridge to drive over. Our bus driver (regular travel bus) stopped on the bridge so people could take pictures. Nobody could tell us why he stopped on the bridge. We figured only afterwards that it is the worlds highest bridge we drove on.

london8882• 9 years ago

Thanks for posting this - I use the BBC site from the UK and wouldn't have seen it otherwise as it's on the .com site. Also interesting to see the comments about the reporter's Chinese.

factsaresacred• 9 years ago

Great video and editing.

What China has achieved is truly incredible. For anybody young and commitment free (or even just commitment free), you should go there. Cool people, so much opportunity, and you get to live in the heart of a rising super-power.

Also, that guy speaks Chinese like an excited teenager.

slfnflctd• 9 years ago

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?

FreakyT• 9 years ago

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?

liuw4• 9 years ago

There are tons of foreigners in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen so there must be some ways to get into the country (and work there).

A few years back a friend told me work permit was easy to get as long as you got a sponsor. Not sure how hard it is today though.

dfguo• 9 years ago

Strikingly is a YC-funded company based in Shanghai. We sponsor visa. Typically, a person with 2 years of working experience can get work visa issued in few weeks.

We are hiring people in engineering, sales and marketing departments https://www.strikingly.com/s/careers

mc32• 9 years ago

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

blackbagboys• 9 years ago

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.

liuw4• 9 years ago

Wow, just wow. I knew about this bridge but didn't really realise it is so impressive. The view is just spectacular.

I can't wait to arrange a trip there.

shubhamjain• 9 years ago

What an incredible achievement. Every time I see China's engineering marvels, or any visible statistics of its progress, I feel a slight tinge sadness as an Indian citizen. In India, such feats are few and far between and if you account the time taken to complete them, the scenario is even more depressing.

Chenab bridge, touted as soon-to-be world's tallest railway bridge, for instance, was scheduled to completed by 2009. Work halted due to safety concerns, but began again an year later. The date was, then, shifted to 2015 and now, the newer estimate suggest it will be completed by 2019 [1]. I am not sure if we'll be able to abide by that too.

Democracy might give people something to cheer about, but, for a country fraught with inefficiencies, it does make progress awfully slow.

[1] http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/transportation/...

melling• 9 years ago

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.

jhayward2• 9 years ago

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

It's not that we can't get it accomplished reasonably, you'd be amazed at how fast and cheaply major projects can be developed if funding is properly structured. It's rather that we've wasted our treasure on other things. Jack Ma had an interesting comment at Davos[1] - what would the US be like if we had spent the $14 trillion we've wasted on war and wall street bailouts on infrastructure, research, and education in the Midwest?

[1] http://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/18/chinese-billionaire-jack-ma-s...

mistermann6• 9 years ago

America gave away its leadership in the world

More specifically, CEO's of American corporations with a time horizon of at most 5 years.

orthoganol• 9 years ago

It's also a problem that our culture is so damn obsessed with cars, which we have in part to thank the auto industry shoving itself down consumers throats, lobbying, and running into the dirt other viable modes of transportation for almost a century. I'd take sophisticated, public transportation and efficient inter regional lines any day over American Car Culture.

I just don't think you can lament the state of inter regional transportation in the US without talking about our country's very unique obsession and history with the auto industry.

discordianfish• 9 years ago

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.

losteric2• 9 years ago

It seemed like the project was started with unclear/unvetted requirements, led by bureaucracy and image instead of engineering. China tends to do things the other way around.

That smoke exhaust system seems absurd - I don't know how the architectural plans even left the design phase. It should have been isolated and designed such that it could be replaced with a conventional approach cheaply.

The rest of the project sounds like a deadline-driven fixed-resource software project with incompetent management - hacks and cut corners everywhere.

diggan• 9 years ago

Heh, funny but not that long time (started in 2006, planned to be finished by 2020), while Sagrada Familia (here in Barcelona) started at 1882 and after stopping/starting/stopping forever, it's not estimated to be finished by 2026–2028 (so about 140 years, if accurate).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagrada_Fam%C3%ADlia

jjcc• 9 years ago

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.

slackingoff2017• 9 years ago

The CPP is a one party system and anything but Democratic. To dissent or attempt to form another political party is illegal. Whether the election process within the CPP is Democratic doesn't matter, the vast majority of citizens have no vote.

China is a classic communist dictatorship with a few Democratic elements.

seszett• 9 years ago

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)

What you are describing is some kind of collegial governance, but absolutely not a democratic government. Contrary to what you are saying, voting systems that exclude the "average people" are literally undemocratic.

Now, you can very well argue that democracy isn't the best or most efficient system, but the Chinese system just isn't democratic, and is not really leaning towards it either.

Camillo• 9 years ago

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

sebasxnco• 9 years ago

!Woah¡ without words... It's amazing.

MarkMc• 9 years ago

An engineering marvel, but most likely an economic white elephant. The New York Times recently had a more critical report on China's bridges [0]

China is addicted to infrastructure projects to boost its GDP. The problem is that these projects in aggregate produce a poor economic return, so China's debt as a percentage of GDP is growing unsustainably. At some point it will be forced to have a painful adjustment to lower growth, especially for investment spending.

Personally I find Larry Summers analysis pursuasive when he argues that China will most likely achieve 4% growth over next two decades [1]

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/10/world/asia/china-bridges-...

[1] http://www.nber.org/digest/mar15/w20573.html

bane• 9 years ago

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.

kqr2• 9 years ago

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...

Kardinal• 9 years ago

What China has achieved is truly incredible. I knew about this bridge but didn't really realise it is so impressive. The view is just spectacular.

blahedo2• 9 years ago

Can someone explain the statement about the length of the cables (in the section starting about 2:48) that they'd stretch from Beijing to New York if laid end to end? It seems so obviously false (there's, what, a few dozen of them, maybe a hundred?) that I assume I'm missing something.

grue2• 9 years ago

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.

blahedo2• 9 years ago

Ohhh that totally makes sense. That image really illustrates the point well, too! Thanks!

contingencies• 9 years ago

The Beipangjiang's twin is the Nanpangjiang, which is a fascinating tributary to the Pearl River Delta and one of the longest rivers in China by total flow length. It is followed in part by the French narrow-guage railway from Haiphong to Kunming and also spanned by some amazing bridges and these days many dams. Southwest China is really impressive topographically.

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

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