Opinion - News Analysis   

On the highway to prosperity

Pallavi Aiyar

From not a single kilometre of highway in 1988, China now has a world-class network of some 41,000 km of highways, second only to the U.S. in size.

THERE IS perhaps nothing that engenders as much China-envy south of the Himalayas as the erstwhile Middle Kingdom's multi-laned, silken-smooth highways. At the start of the 1990s India's highway infrastructure was actually ahead of China's in terms of total route km as well as route km/head of population. Fifteen years later, while India's expressways languish in pot-holed chaos, China boasts of a world-class highway network of some 41,000 kilometres, second only to the United States in size.

According to the Chinese Transport Planning and Research Institute, 24,000 km of new highways were built between 2001 and 2005, averaging a staggering 4,800 km a year. This is roughly equal to the total expressway length of Canada and Germany combined, the two countries that rank third and fourth in the world in terms of expressways. In India, such figures might cause more than a few eyes to pop right out, but in China, 41,000 km of gleaming freeways are still not considered sufficient.

Another 24,000 km are slated for construction over the next five years. The target is to have a network stretching some 65,000 km by 2010 and reaching a length of 85,000 km by 2020. The United States' total highway length stood at 90,000 km in 2005.

What is truly remarkable is that while the U.S. took 40-50 years constructing its Interstate, China has gone from not a single kilometre of highway in 1988 to its present world number two spot, in just over 15 years. Moreover, when America began its expressway expansion in the 1950s its per capita income was already higher than that of China's today. China's highway building achievements are thus unparalleled in history.

China's National Expressway Network (NEN) or Gaosu Gonglu is designed to connect the vast country's landlocked and relatively impoverished interior with the dynamic coastal provinces along the eastern seaboard. It is Beijing's intention to literally stitch the country together with asphalt and concrete, bringing the more remote areas closer to the centre while at the same time addressing concerns of the urban-rural and interior-coast income divides.

`Roads out of poverty'

The central government believes these highways will be roads out of poverty for China's millions, 200 million or so of whom still lived on less than a dollar a day in 2000. By facilitating the efficient movement of goods, people, and services through the provision of improved infrastructure and connectivity, China hopes to enjoy economic and social benefits at a macro level and simultaneously reign in burgeoning discontentment in the rural areas.

The country is thus investing 2 trillion yuan ($241.9 billion) in its "7-9-18" national expressway system thus called because the network will include seven lines emanating from Beijing, nine running through the country from north to south and 18 speeding their way from east to west. The network is intended to connect all towns and cities with a population of more than 200,000.

Once it is completed, residents along the prosperous eastern coast of the country are expected to be able to access the nearest highway in an average of 30 minutes. For those in the central provinces the corresponding time is targeted at one hour while for people in the extremely remote west, two hours is all it will take to connect with an expressway.

Already, every major city in China is in the continuous throes of road expansion. For example, in the southern city of Guangzhou, work is scheduled to begin this year on no less than 12 new expressways running from south to north. The city government is spending $2.6 billion on transport alone this year.

Even Medog county in the south-eastern part of Tibet, the most inaccessible part of the already remote province, is slated to be connected up by a highway within the next five-year-plan period (2006-2010).

And it is not just expressways that are being built, expanded and upgraded but local and township roads as well. According to the World Bank, $40 billion a year was invested in China's road networks between 1990 and 2005. While roughly one third of this went into the construction of the NEN, the rest was spent on local roads, over 400,000 km of which were improved during this time. According to China's National Reform and Development Commission, the country's planning authority, 18 billion yuan ($2.2 billion) will be spent this year itself on the building of 23,000 km of rural roads in western China.

Travel in China has been transformed by the NEN. A decade ago a journey of a 100 kilometres used to mean a day's travel in most parts of the country. Today it usually takes an hour or two at most. In a country where until the 1990s domestic travel was strictly curtailed and formal permission from a state employer was needed to buy plane tickets or soft sleeper train berths, the NEN has opened up a whole new world. Newly rich couples are setting off on long distance road journeys for the adventure the open road promises. Private car ownership has rocketed from 6.25 million in 2000 to 17 million in 2005.

Millions of migrant workers use these highways to make their way to more prosperous areas in search of jobs. Food security has improved unimaginably. In Beijing, until only a few years ago, the sole vegetable available in the winter was cabbage, so that the city's streets were famously piled high with the vegetable throughout the long cold period. Today, the cabbages have disappeared from Beijing's streets and instead shops are stocked with the choicest of fruits and vegetables trucked in from the warmer southern areas.

Just-in-time delivery has become possible allowing manufacturers and distributors to hold smaller inventories and respond more quickly to changing market tastes. Wal Mart now relies on a single major distribution centre in Guangdong province for supplying stores throughout China, something that would have been unthinkable without the recent expansion of the NEN. Other than the benefits of reduced travel times and logistical costs, the NEN also has a much lower accident rate compared to local roads, very significant given that China has one of the world's worst road safety records. Six hundred and eighty people die and 45,000 are injured every day on Chinese roads according to the World Health Organisation.

America's Interstate brought prosperity and change to the country and China's NEN is doing the same. However, such rapid highway building has created problems as well. Most notably the building spree has displaced millions of people, most of them poor farmers who often receive little or no compensation.

Moreover, China's expanding roads have brought with them a concomitant boom in car ownership leading to serious environmental challenges in a country that is already plagued by pollution. China is home to 16 of the world's 20 most polluted cities according to the WHO. In cities like Shanghai, automobiles account for 70-80 per cent of air pollution. Experts say China's energy use will roughly double in the next decade and an increasing demand for gasoline will be the key to this. Ten years ago, gasoline for cars made up around 10 per cent of China's demand for oil. By the end of the current decade, it is predicted that it will make up more than two-fifths of the country's total oil demand, according to the Development Research Centre for China's State Council.

China's highways also remain underutilised. Vast stretches of six-lane expressways in remote provincial interiors are often totally traffic-free — surreal, immaculate roads to nowhere. This is primarily because tolls are the main mechanism for financing expressway construction. But while these tolls are set at levels comparable to that charged by several developed countries including the U.S., the affordability of tolls in China is amongst the world's lowest. This results in extremely low levels of expressway traffic particularly in poorer areas where people are least able to afford the toll. However, these are also the areas that would benefit most from the improved connectivity highways afford.

Nonetheless, despite the challenges posed by the construction of an expressway network, of the size and at the speed that China is undertaking, nothing is more emblematic of modern China than the highway. The open road hints at new possibilities, the chance for a rebirth; the mobility it offers bringing freedoms only dreamt of before. The highway is quite literally China's road to the 21st century.

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Stories in this Section

The LTTE's war trap
DDT and malaria control
ICDS — The entitlement of every Indian child
The Mumbai death cells
On the highway to prosperity
Corrections and clarifications
Genes, ancestry, and where we came from
Massive environmental damage in Lebanon
`India will not kneel'
The human story
Unwise move

Copyright © 2006, The Hindu. Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of The Hindu