China Briefing | China’s airports lead the world – so why the delays?
Groundbreaking buildings have made the Chinese proud and foreign visitors envious. The same cannot be said of services and management
Foreign visitors to China are most likely to be impressed by the modern airports, high-speed railways, subways, and superhighways sprouting across the country.
This is particularly true for visitors from the United States where much infrastructure is getting old and worn out. In a tweet this month, Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of American investment bank Goldman Sachs and a frequent visitor to China, once again praised the country’s infrastructure and lamented how America was lagging behind. “Arrived in China, as always impressed by condition of airport, roads, cell service, etc. US needs to invest in infrastructure to keep up,” he tweeted.
China’s investments, worth trillions of yuan over the past decade, have produced world-class infrastructure projects on an unprecedented scale and speed. These projects have become the envy of the world and a showcase for the country’s autocratic leadership. For instance, until 2002, Beijing, with 20 million people, had only two subway lines. Since then, Beijing has built 17 lines crisscrossing the city with a total length of 574km.
China’s airports, which won Blankfein’s praise, are even more impressive. Take Terminal 3 of the Beijing international airport, the massive glass and steel structure billed as the world’s largest airport building. Designed by the British architect Norman Foster, who also designed Hong Kong’s Chek Lap Kok airport, the terminal was completed in less than four years for the Beijing Summer Olympics in 2008, a task some had thought impossible. At the time, it was hailed as the world’s most advanced airport building and was designed to handle 50 million passengers a year by 2020. This year, China announced 74 projects to build new airports and develop existing ones by 2020, including an even bigger airport in Beijing, scheduled for operation in 2019 and designed to take 72 million passengers by 2025.
While all this hardware has made Chinese proud and foreign visitors envious, the same cannot be said about the software, in terms of management and services. On that, China has much to learn, even from America whose shabby infrastructure is sneered at by many Chinese.