The Huajiang Grand Canyon Bridge can fit almost two Eiffel Towers under it and will be touted as evidence of China’s engineering prowess when it opens this month. Photo / X
China will open the world’s tallest bridge this month, besting its own record with a structure that can fit almost two Eiffel Towers beneath it.
The Huajiang Grand Canyon Bridge in southwestern Guizhou, one of China’s poorest provinces, stands a staggering 625m above ground, making it almost twice the height of Paris’ landmark tower.
It stretches 2890m end to end, according to Chinese state media - almost the length of the National Mall in Washington - and spans a deep ravine locally dubbed “earth’s crack”.
It is the latest feat of engineering that underscores China’s outsize infrastructure ambitions.
“The Communist Party believes in building enormous projects to boost the economy and burnish political prestige,” said Dan Wang, a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and the author of Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future.
The People’s Daily, the mouthpiece of China’s Communist Party, touted the bridge as a new “China miracle” that shows “Guizhou speed” and “Guizhou wisdom”, saying it characterises a new stage in the country’s infrastructure development.
The bridge, under construction since 2022, passed a five-day load test late last month, the state-run Xinhua News Agency reported, and is expected to open to traffic later this month.
It will cut travel time across the Beipan River - between the counties of Guanling and Zhenfeng, which have a population of about 600,000 between them - from two hours to just two minutes.
The bridge is expected to bring in tourists: A transparent, 213m-tall observation lift will take visitors to a viewing tower atop the bridge, Chinese state broadcaster CCTV reported. The bridge also includes a nearly 1km glass path for pedestrians.
Li Mingshui, a civil engineering professor at Southwest Jiaotong University in Chengdu, who has advised local governments on the wind engineering and vibration control of major bridges, said strengthening transportation infrastructure is a key pillar in China’s regional development strategy.
“Unlike the United States, which already has a highly developed highway system, many regions in western China remain poorly connected. What we are doing is to bridge those gaps and work on those weakest links,” Li said.
Local engineers have been describing their pride.
“Numerous bridge builders like me … are lucky to have caught up with the golden era of [China’s] traffic infrastructure boom,” Liu Hao, the project’s chief engineer, told Xinhua last month. Before Huajiang, the 42-year-old supervised the construction of six other mega bridges, almost all in Guizhou.
“When the Huajiang Canyon Bridge opens to traffic, I will definitely bring my daughter here to take a look and tell her proudly that ‘this is another mega project your dad and many other people have accomplished together,’” he said.
Engineers said they faced challenges including steep canyon slopes and powerful winds and used a lighter arch design to cut the weight of the bridge by 30%.
China is home to a lot of record-breaking infrastructure.
It already held the record for the world’s highest bridge, with the Beipanjiang Bridge, at 564m-high, in 2016 displacing the Millau Viaduct in southern France for that title.
China is also home to the longest bridge spanning the open ocean, the 35km-long Hangzhou Bay Bridge in Zhejiang province.
But the dizzying pace of construction has also led to accidents. Last month, at least 12 workers were killed when a bridge under construction in the northwestern province of Qinghai collapsed, state media reported.
China has relied on huge state-backed infrastructure construction projects to spur growth, especially in inland regions, which have long lagged behind the prosperous coast.
China’s robust economic growth over the past four decades has been fuelled by its infrastructure construction, McKinsey, the consultancy, said in a 2023 report. Much of this was financed by local governments, which has increasingly led to enormous levels of debt.
China’s leaders have promoted infrastructure as a backbone for its growth model.
President Xi Jinping has urged an “all-around” push for infrastructure to revive growth in the post-Covid years. Last month, Premier Li Qiang stressed the need to “harness the exemplary and galvanising role of megaprojects” to boost investment and domestic consumption.
Poor and inland provinces like Guizhou, a mountainous area near the border with Vietnam known for its dramatic karst landscape, have been the target of this effort as the central Government has pushed a “strategic hinterland” strategy.
Despite its isolation and relative poverty, Guizhou boasts an extensive infrastructure network, with 11 airports, tall bridges and new roads.
These megaprojects are “not bridges to nowhere”, Li said, arguing that their long-term economic benefits will outweigh their construction costs.
But for Wang this approach reflects a different priority. “Rather than distributing funds to people for them to spend as they wish, officials in Beijing are much more keen to control resources to build monumental projects,” he said.
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