Promises to build homes and infrastructure in the UK are dwarfed by China’s rapid rate of expansion, writes IAN RITCHIE
Sir Keir Starmer is planning his first visit to China later this month and it will surely be a very sobering experience for him. Far from being the poor, developing nation of 40 years ago, he will discover that China now has a standard of infrastructure that we in the UK can only dream of.
By coincidence, I am in China right now. I last visited 20 years ago and back then the streets were busy mostly with bicycles. Nowadays they are just as clogged up in traffic jams as any other city in the world, almost half of them electric vehicles, a vehicle category dominated by the Chinese.
In the last 20 years during which the UK has failed to build one high-speed railway from London to Birmingham, China has built a 31,000-mile network of high-speed rail lines connecting over 550 cities across the entire country, servicing 97% of those with a population of 500,000 or more.
I am writing this on a smooth new high-speed train going over 200 miles per hour, and covering 770 miles, heading from Beijing towards the most northerly city of Harbin. If it had been built in the UK that length could link all major cities from London to Inverness.
In the time that the UK has failed to add even one runway to an existing airport, China has built 130 airports at a rate of six or eight a year.
Where we have failed to build any new major highways, China has executed in two decades the world’s largest road building programme in history, building 96,000 miles of high-quality expressways – a network which is now about twice as extensive as the US Interstate Highways.
And as China is, in parts, a mountainous country, many of these road and rail developments have involved complex elevated tracks and tunnels. The new Yaxi Expressway, the so-called ‘Sky-High Road,’ consists of 270 bridges and 25 tunnels.
But the most dramatic development has been in housing. At a time when the UK struggles to build 250,000 houses a year, the Chinese, in the past 20 years, have built an incredible 170 million. Along the way, old housing of an average of 10 square metres, have been replaced with today’s average of 40 square metres, comparable in size with most European countries. And 90% of those are owned by the occupants.
A Chinese colleague remarked to me that “in the last 40 years we have gone from having nothing to having everything” and it really must feel that way; 800 million people have been taken out of poverty.
Innovation is everywhere – our taxi from the airport drove itself into the city, and room service in the hotel is delivered by a neat self-propelled robot.
‘When the UK struggles to build 250,000 houses a year, the Chinese, in the past 20 years, have built an incredible 170 million’
One wonders how China has achieved so much in recent times. One reason might be the political leadership. Whereas lawyers and policy wonks lead the UK government, and real-estate businessmen and TV pundits lead the US one, it is seriously qualified individuals that lead China.
At the turn of the century all eight members of the Politburo Standing Committee (the highest seat of power) had engineering degrees, resulting in the phenomenal infrastructure achievements in subsequent years. Since then, its makeup has diversified to include economists and social scientists, aiming to manage the next transition towards a service-based economy.
Their long-term thinking has resulted in an impressive set of strengths such as control over almost all the so-called ‘rare earths’ minerals that are required for advanced manufacturing.
They have achieved total dominance in the production of climate-friendly technology such as wind turbines and battery manufacturing, required for electric vehicles and for grid storage.
They are now investing heavily in fundamental research and are developing leadership positions, among others in artificial intelligence, quantum computing, nuclear fusion and medical technology.
Sir Paul Nurse, the incoming president of the Royal Society, says the UK looks “increasingly third-worldish” compared to China which is pushing ahead with vast funding of scientific research. It has just overtaken the US in the Nature Index, which tracks high-quality papers in leading journals.
The US has helped this process by attacking its domestic scientific research base, where anything involving climate science has been cancelled, and funding has been cut across the board, and on immigration, where international highly skilled immigrants are being turned away. Silicon Valley companies recently recommending staff with H1-B visas (those with exceptional talent) to avoid leaving the country in case they are prevented from returning.
China has responded by increasing its various incentives to lure back technologists who might return, and there is so much entrepreneurial growth that they find it attractive to do so.
Looking forward, it is the only economy in the world capable of giving Silicon Valley a run for its money.
President Trump may have a mixed record in ‘Making America Great Again’ but his recent actions have certainly had the effect of helping to ‘make China great.’
With 30% of the world’s manufacturing and increasing leadership in a rising range of innovative fields of technology, China can no longer be ignored.
The 20th century may have been America’s. But the 21st century is clearly shaping up to belong to the Chinese.
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