China's public miracles

Many visitors to Shanghai return raving about the ride from the airport into the city on the world's first magnetic train at window-blurring speed. Few mention that the project is not economically viable. But if one leaves economics aside for the moment and focuses on engineering and technology, the recently completed Three Gorges Dam on the mighty Yangtse as well as the inauguration two weeks ago of China's high-altitude rail link to Tibet stand out as formidable achievements. Much attention has been devoted to the wisdom of some of these projects, but if one withholds judgment on such questions, what has been demonstrated are engineering expertise and project management ability on an awesome scale. The Konkan railway and the Sardar Sarovar dam are simply not in the same league.

Hu Jingtao, China's premier, might have been indulging in some hyperbole when describing the 1,140-kilometre rail connection between Golmud in Quinhai province and Lhasa in Tibet as a "miracle" that demonstrates the "courage, confidence and ability" of the Chinese people, but any fair assessment would testify that the term "engineering feat" is not fluff for public consumption. The new link is the world's highest railway line, operating at over 5,000 metres' altitude (50 per cent higher than Leh in India's Ladakh) at some points. The Indian Railways' line being laid to the Kashmir valley is barely a third as high; and while it does pose technical challenges, it certainly does not require oxygen tanks on board, let alone windows with ultraviolet-ray filters. The real marvel, though, is the chiller system installed for the tracks to ensure that the Tibet train's pressure and heat do not turn the permafrost of the rail-bed soggy. By one account, this is a provision that western engineers had dismissed as an impossible task, so Chinese engineers took it on as a challenge.

China's public sector has its disaster stories (most state-owned enterprises have to be shut down as market economics takes over), but its giant infrastructure projects demonstrate a dramatic level of confidence in domestic solutions""Three Gorges, for instance, had been repeatedly scoffed at by western engineers. Gargantuan in scale and ambition, it was envisaged as a solution to many of the country's most intractable problems, including power shortages. Its critics have argued that any such hydroelectric project's turbines would be sure to get silted over the years (echoing Egypt's Aswan High experience), thus rendering them useless. Undeterred, China went right ahead, with results that can be judged only after a considerable passage of time. Indeed, there may be no resolution of the debate even after decades have passed, as the experience with India's Bhakra-Nangal shows.

It is interesting, nevertheless, that significant parts of China's scientific establishment do not operate in English, and avoid Internet exposure, and this makes it hard to assess their precise level of sophistication. China's impressive space programme, for example, requires computer software and programming that may or may not have been indigenously developed. Claims of indigenous genius are made often enough in India""and there has been success with parallel computing, the space programme and atomic energy (to name some obvious examples). But Indian patriotism should not blind the country to the scale difference that China has demonstrated. What is also clear is that Chinese state-funded projects that involve high-level engineering skills are not about to descend the scale of grandiosity any time soon.