Creation: Political Economy Group of the Proletarian Liberation Struggle Association
On January 17, 2025, the Huajiang Gorge Bridge, the world’s tallest bridge, built by Guizhou Bridge Construction Group Co., Ltd., was connected. The Huajiang Gorge Bridge is located above the Huajiang Grand Canyon Scenic Area, a 3A-level national scenic spot in Guizhou Province. The bridge deck is vertically 625 meters above the water surface, with a total length of 2,890 meters and a main span of 1,420 meters. Once completed, it will become the world’s tallest bridge and the longest mountain-span bridge. According to reports, the construction period for the Huajiang Gorge Bridge is 42 months, with an estimated cost of about 2.2 billion yuan; as a key project of Guizhou’s “14th Five-Year Plan” integrating tourism and infrastructure, the bridge also plans to include a service area, and supporting projects such as a bridge museum, a 200-meter vertical observation elevator, an elevated sightseeing café, and restaurants have been launched simultaneously. According to official media, the bridge “will promote the development of the surrounding ethnic villages centered on tourism, fostering the growth of primary, secondary, and tertiary industries, and will add a vibrant stroke to rural revitalization and modernization efforts.”
Statistics show that there are nearly 30,000 highway bridges within Guizhou Province, and among the top 100 tallest bridges in the world, 46 are located in Guizhou. On the surface, building mountain-crossing bridges seems beneficial for transportation. Official propaganda from China Railway also often claims: after the completion of the Huajiang Gorge Bridge, the driving time across the two sides will be shortened from one hour to two minutes; the completion of the Beipanjiang Bridge (formerly the world’s tallest bridge, located in Guizhou Province) will reduce the travel time on the Hangrui Expressway by three hours.
Despite possessing dozens of world-class bridges, China Railway officials have never disclosed the traffic volume or toll revenue of these bridges. In 2023, Guizhou Province completed three world-class bridges: the Deyu Expressway Wujingjiang Bridge, the Guijin Ancient Expressway Jinfeng Wujingjiang Bridge, and the Chishui River Bridge. However, that year, the provincial fiscal deficit was extremely severe, with public budget revenue only 207.825 billion yuan and expenditures reaching 620.283 billion yuan. Only with central transfers totaling 989.833 billion yuan did the province barely balance its books.
So, why is China Railway constructing large-scale bridge projects extensively in Guizhou Province? This is an important means for the Guizhou provincial government to implement Keynesian policies. Keynesianism believes that economic crises are caused by insufficient investment by capitalists, leading to reduced production and increased unemployment. Therefore, Keynes proposed “deficit financing” — as long as the government borrows to attract monopolistic capital to expand investment, such as public infrastructure projects, it can absorb a large number of unemployed people, increase national income, and expand the consumer market. In Guizhou, where the land is “flat for three miles,” building highways and bridges is undoubtedly a reasonable excuse to expand investment. During the construction of the Huajiang Gorge Bridge, over two thousand workers were engaged. Moreover, the surrounding tourism projects and bridge site designs that were planned from the start, crossing scenic areas, reflect that the so-called “rural revitalization” promoted by China Railway officials also relies on tourism to stimulate consumption and local employment, which is also a Keynesian policy.
However, Keynesianism cannot solve the economic crisis; government deficit finance can only be recovered through exploitation, which only temporarily delays the crisis, ultimately leading to a more violent outbreak. China Railway continues to build bridges among the mountains, pretending to show a “rich and powerful” nation with one “world-class” project after another, but it will soon collapse along with its economic crisis.
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/38lnSvGM9TyRxILgx4guag
Regarding the fiscal revenue, it feels a bit confusing, and I don’t quite understand it. I want to ask how they achieved the balance between revenue and expenditure?
It should be that the central government directly gave more than 900 billion to the Guizhou government.
Meanwhile, villagers in Fengjie County, Chongqing, can only clear debris from collapsed roads by hand, while roads that truly need repair are left unattended. In fact, for villagers in these remote areas of Guizhou, they simply cannot afford cars, and these bridges hold little significance for them. A large portion of the money spent on building these bridges ultimately ends up in the pockets of bureaucratic monopolist bourgeoisie.
It seems unclear how this was calculated. If possible, please provide the source of the higher-level transfer payments for Guizhou Province.
Objectively speaking, repairing bridges and roads is beneficial to the proletariat, right? 
I didn’t mean to imply that the Chinese repair is good.
Most of the direct manifestations are beneficial for the people’s travel, making it more convenient. But this could also lead to increased exploitation, and the people might not be able to afford high tolls or bridge fees. Therefore, I believe specific issues should be analyzed case by case.
Thank you. Usually, travel in the village is by carpool minivans or motorcycles (three-wheeled small trucks). Tolls are generally not charged when passing through the village to the county seat (my impression is based on experience).
I don’t know much about this, I only know that when passing through highways and some villages, tolls are charged. The situation might be different in various places. Generally, transportation from villages to outside areas is very inconvenient, which is also due to the uneven development of capitalist society, distorted agricultural development, leading to rural backwardness and farmer poverty. The bourgeoisie only builds roads for profit, so urban transportation is developed, but they don’t care about rural areas.
Yes, no one is farming now. I remember our old village chief (actually the former production team leader, as we still call it the original production team) was a Red Guard. When I was a child, he often came to my house to recite Mao Zedong’s quotations and sing revolutionary songs. Currently, only their family has over seventy years old and farms a large piece of land, but the income is also very low. I saw on the forum that the self-sufficiency rate in agriculture has dropped significantly, which is also the reason why the middle-revision government abandoned the farmers.
In fact, it doesn’t help much. China’s tofu-dreg projects, we don’t even know how long they will last, and many super bridges have very low traffic volume. For example, the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge, in such an economically developed area, has only 4,000 vehicles daily, whereas the original estimate was 20,000. Not to mention mountainous areas like Guizhou, where the traffic volume is unimaginably low.
So I want to ask, if the traffic volume is low, does that mean it doesn’t need to be repaired?
However, the money spent on road and bridge repairs comes from the people. In a capitalist society, this money cannot be used where the people truly need it. In such sparsely populated areas, the majority of local residents cannot afford cars, and they urgently need well-maintained mountain roads for daily use. However, mid-level repairs waste all the money on places where only a few cars pass each year. The bureaucratic monopolist bourgeoisie building bridges embezzles and enriches themselves from these projects, and the people cannot benefit from them. Their urgent needs are unmet, yet the taxes collected are wasted on these things.
A related analysis was also discussed in Keynesian articles in forums and journals, with a diagram at the end showing a public notice of a regional government project, revealing an astonishing level of corruption. Under capitalism, any public works often end up making the proletariat’s suffering worse.
It depends on objective needs. These bridges are used by small cars and large trucks, but the local people can’t afford these vehicles at all. Even if these bridges are built, they can only serve a very small number of wealthy and leisure people for tourism. What the local people need more is to repair the mountain roads. I just saw a news report about a landslide on a mountain road in Chongqing, where the people had to clear the fallen rocks themselves.
As a rural person, I think building roads is very important. If we have no roads, we can only walk on foot. Those who harvest grains and come to sell things also rely on roads. Also, buying a car is not that difficult now. When we go to towns and villages, neighbors often carpool.
Sigh. In China, the price of one jin of wheat is lower than the same amount of mineral water. The Chinese Communist Party’s reforms destroyed the original socialist Chinese agricultural collectivization, and agriculture regressed back to feudal small-scale peasant production, where farmers only have “land as thin as noodles.” The CCP then built agriculture on the exploitation of “large grain growers” who exploit farmers and plunder colonial peoples.
Road construction is indeed very important. The socialist Chinese government helps many difficult areas to build roads, but not like now, where it facilitates rural people to go to the city for work and be exploited, and allows them to embezzle corruption in the name of road construction, oppressing the people. Different people have different purposes when doing this. At that time, the UK had the Cape Cairo plan, and when Russia invaded China, they also built railways to penetrate inland, facilitating troop and weapon transportation for invasion. Now, China is investing in railway construction in many third-world countries, ostensibly to improve the lives of third-world people, but in reality, it is for economic invasion. The cost of a single road is actually less than one-third of the current government quotation, most of the money has been embezzled, and this money itself comes from taxes paid by the working people.
You have a point. During the socialist period, low traffic volume did not mean that repairs were unnecessary; if there was a need, efforts would be made to meet it. But the main factor depends on the purpose. Under capitalism, such bridge repairs are mainly used to exploit Keynesianism. Regarding Keynesianism, you can refer to “Keynesianism in China” in the monthly magazine. As for the situation in rural areas, including vehicle usage, I am not very familiar and still need to investigate.
Road construction is indeed very important for rural areas. After reading your comment, my thoughts are probably like this:
China is a very large country, and under the capitalist system, the economic development levels vary greatly across different regions. The place mentioned in this news is Guizhou, if I remember correctly. Before China announced the “comprehensive poverty alleviation,” Guizhou had the highest number of impoverished households, and the rural people in the mountains there have a difficult economic situation. My view is roughly as I said above: such spectacular bridges that cross valleys are only accessible to a very small number of tourists, and what truly connects mountain villages are those mountain roads, which should be repaired and reinforced more. The same money, if truly meant to serve the people, should be invested more in improving local livelihoods, repairing roads used daily by the people, rather than spending all the money on these spectacular bridges. But for China’s infrastructure projects, the latter is often chosen because such projects are easier opportunities for local officials to embezzle funds.
Regarding cars, I checked, and in 2024, the national car ownership will be 453 million. This number should exclude those who own multiple cars, large monopolistic companies, and official vehicles. Even if this data is accurate, there still seem to be many people who cannot afford to buy a car. It seems like only a few people pooling money to buy a car, which still feels quite difficult.
Road construction is necessary, but it cannot be viewed solely from the perspective of traffic flow without considering the class nature of the issue. First, Guizhou Province is a very poor province under the rule of the Chinese Communist Party, and the ethnic autonomous region where the Dajiang Gorge Bridge is located is even more difficult. Building bridges there is largely not for the local people, because doing so does not allow the capitalists of the Chinese Communist Party to extract more profits from the people. Second, these large bridges generally have toll stations, charging 20 yuan each time. Given the very low income of local farmers, this is not a small amount, nor is it likely to serve daily traffic. Moreover, the Chinese Communist Party itself admits that it hopes to develop tourism through these bridges. Finally, the funds used by the Chinese Communist Party to build these bridges are essentially derived from the people’s labor and are a form of exploitation. However, the beneficiaries are the wealthy petty bourgeoisie and capitalists who come to visit, which in itself cannot be said to be beneficial to the masses.