The Governance Gap: Why China Builds the Future While the West Can't Fix the Past
The Anglo-American infrastructure crisis is not an economic or technological failure; it is a governance failure.
Editor’s note: Douglas Rooney is a writer and educator working in Beijing. He writes about China and politics mostly. The article reflects the author’s opinions and not necessarily the views of China Up Close.
At the end of September, a new Chinese infrastructure project reached completion and immediately went viral on both Chinese and Western social media. This was the Huajiang Grand Canyon Bridge in southwest China’s Guizhou Province - otherwise known as the tallest bridge in the world.
The bridge is over 9 times higher than San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, floating 625m above the Beipan River. At a staggering 2,890 meters long, the bridge connects two sides of the Huajiang Grand Canyon, shortening the time locals take to navigate the canyon from over two hours to under two minutes.
However, the new bridge is important to the economic development of the region, not just because it facilitates trade and provides easier access to otherwise fairly remote mountainous communities. The regional government has realized the potential tourist draw of the world’s tallest bridge, and has drawn up a detailed tourism plan for the area with a focus on extreme sports, science education, and sightseeing. The plan appears to be working since during China’s recent national day holidays, around 220,000 people made a trip to the area.
The viral potential of the world’s tallest bridge is pretty obvious (for one thing, the views are stunning), but reactions to videos and pictures of the Huajiang Grand Canyon Bridge were a little different on Chinese and Western social media. While Chinese netizens marveled at the engineering feat of building such a long bridge in a remote location, one question dominated Western social media discussions: why can’t we build something like this?
Why Can’t the West Build Anything?
The West wasn’t always like this. In the 18th century, the United Kingdom built a network of canals, viaducts, roads, and bridges so well constructed that they are still used today. In the 19th century, Britain then established the world’s first rail network, and, while there are no geographical barriers in Great Britain to rival those of China, British engineers had no problems building infrastructure in all the different climates and geographies of their vast empire (at least when it suited the interests of British financiers to do so). In the U.S., too, the 19th and early 20th centuries saw the construction of such epic infrastructure projects as the transcontinental railway and the Hoover Dam. Yet, today, these great engineering marvels are being left to crumble, and very little is being done to replace them. So, what has changed?
I think we can get a pretty clear idea of what is going wrong by zooming in on one of the most egregious examples of infrastructure mismanagement: Britain’s High Speed 2 (HS2) rail service (so-called because Britain’s first - and only - high speed rail service connects London to Paris).
By the first decade of the 21st century, British transport officials were becoming embarrassed. High-speed rail had come to Asia in the 1960s, and it had arrived in mainland Europe by the 1980s. Yet, in Britain, the nation that had given the world the railway, the trains had become infamous for being slow, outdated, expensive, and plagued with delays and staff shortages. As a matter of national pride, then, it was decided in 2010 to link all of England’s major urban areas with high-speed rail. So, one of the last acts of Gordon Brown’s Labour government before leaving office in 2010 was to set up HS2 Limited - a private company which would spend the public funds set aside to build HS2 from London to the north of England.
Problems developed with the project very quickly. In 2011, HS2 Limited estimated the cost of the project at $32 billion. Only two years later, that had been revised upward to $50 billion. Today, the cost of the whole project is estimated to be somewhere in the region of $100 billion. What is worse, in 2023, the then-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced that he would cancel the northern part of the service. This means that only two cities - London and Birmingham - will be connected by high-speed rail. In other words, British taxpayers are now likely to pay more than double the initial estimate for less than half of the originally proposed line. And it still isn’t done: even the truncated HS2 line connecting London with Birmingham, the UK’s second largest city, will not be fully operational until sometime in the 2030s. Even then, the terminal station will not actually be in central London. Instead, HS2 will terminate in the suburbs, meaning that, if we factor in transfer times from suburban to central London, journeying between Birmingham and the capital by high-speed train will take about the same time as taking the slower (but direct) regular train. So much for the promise of high speed.
How did the largest infrastructure project in a generation become a national embarrassment so great that it is now used as evidence by conservatives in the U.S. to argue against plans to bring high-speed rail to the U.S.? Well, as China has shown, infrastructure on this scale requires national guidance, expertise, and, most crucially, long-term planning - and, unfortunately for rail commuters in the United Kingdom, the British government is lacking in all three.
The last decade has been rather tumultuous for the island kingdom, and this has allowed the chaotic management and ballooning costs to pass under the radar. For example, a key 2017 parliamentary vote to expand funding took place in the middle of Brexit. The transport secretary at the time would later admit to the BBC that the largest constitutional debate in generations meant that parliament had neither the time nor inclination to give proper scrutiny to Britain’s largest infrastructure project. Neither parliament nor government ministers had a clear idea what they were signing off on. This has been an issue throughout the project: HS2 Limited has outlasted seven Prime Ministers and ten Transport Ministers. When turnover at the top of government is this high, oversight becomes much more difficult and, since no minister is likely to be in their job for long, encourages short-term thinking while discouraging the development of any kind of expertise.
Yet, the chaos of the British political system ultimately proved a liability for HS2, for, without proper government buy-in, its continued funding became entirely dependent on a couple of key backers - principally Boris Johnson as both Mayor of London (2008-2016) and Prime Minister (2019-2022). Importantly, however, by 2023, Johnson had left both government and parliament in disgrace. This gave an opportunity to a government aide called Andrew Gilligan (called “rabidly anti-HS2” by the Financial Times) to push the new prime minister, Rishi Sunak, into axing half the project. The southern half would have also probably come on the chopping block if it had not been for Sunak’s defeat in the 2024 election.
To put all this in perspective, China has added about 40,000 km to its high-speed rail network while Britain waits for the opening of a single line over some of the flattest land in the country. But the reason Britain can’t build (and China can) is not due to geography or the economy. Instead, the fundamental reason Britain (and much of the rest of the West) has lost the ability to build reliable infrastructure is due to the political system.
The Governance Lessons of British Misadventures
HS2 has been such an embarrassing disaster because British politics in the last few decades has just not been capable of producing the type of long-term planning that is required for large-scale infrastructure projects. HS2 did not - and does not - have broad institutional support, but instead was driven through by charismatic individuals who saw the project as beneficial for their own political advancement. However, once the individuals left office, the project was left defenseless. In short, large infrastructure projects often take decades, but British politics can only think in terms of the next election cycle.
Of course, these are not governance problems found in the UK alone: Britain’s closest international partner, the United States, is also bedeviled by an inability to plan ahead. Indeed, the top frustration of many nations in dealing with both the Trump and Biden administrations has been that the Americans often cannot clearly articulate what they want. This is because, much as with Britain’s HS2, the structure of the American political system makes it very difficult for the government to commit to one policy long term since the opposite party (or even just a rival wing of the same party) will renege on any promise once it gains control of either the White House or Congress.
China has become the gold standard for global infrastructure construction, but projects like the Huajiang Grand Canyon Bridge or the national high-speed rail network require a huge amount of resources and, most crucially, the iron guarantee from the government that these projects will be completed and form part of a greater strategy for development. For example, local businesses are now able to develop tourism around the Huajiang Grand Canyon Bridge precisely because they can depend on the government to see the project to completion, and know that there is a long-term plan to integrate their efforts into the wider regional development plan. In the United Kingdom, by contrast, businesses were left reeling by Sunak’s surprise 2023 announcement canceling parts of HS2 since many had made long-term plans on the premise that the government had already committed to linking them to London by high-speed rail. And over in the U.S., similar economic chaos has been caused by the flip-flopping over things like internet regulation and trade deals.
The contrasting tales of the Huajiang Grand Canyon Bridge and HS2 are not merely about concrete and steel, but about governance and political will. The Anglo-American infrastructure crisis is not an economic or technological failure; it is a governance failure. The crumbling and mismanaged infrastructure is merely another symptom of a political structure that hasn’t worked for decades, and is now trapped in the kind of short-term thinking that makes large infrastructure projects nearly impossible. So, the question should not be why the West can’t build anything, but how the West makes governance work again.
About the Author
Douglas Rooney: Writer and educator working in Beijing. Writing about China and politics mostly.
Doug’s X page: @doug_rooney
Page Editor: Jin Yulin
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The UK has been in chronic decline since Thatcher introduced neoliberalism, sold off state assets and believed that private capitalists would see the opportunities and allocate funds appropriately.
The failure is due to capitalists not taking risks if there are no profits to be seen in a short timescale, and, as you point out, the inability of the government to think beyond the election cycle. It's basically the dying embers of a global empire.
It is no way to run a country.
The US is a bit different. The government focuses on its foreign policy and commitment to US hegemony. Spending on weapons and warmongering to promote US dominance is now an 80 year old bipartisan strategy, and unwavering support is given to the US corporate sector, particularly the massive multinationals.
The US doesn't take national pride in its infrastructure, nor does it feel shame for the poverty, which is considered self-inflicted, instead it prides itself on military power and measures success in terms of $$$.
one is focused on building the wealth and well-being of their People
the other is focused on building the wealth and well-being of The Shareholders