Another key strategy for the Chinese government in the early twenty-first
century is massive deficit spending on infrastructure as a form of “New Deal” to
resolve infrastructural problems and simultaneously employ huge numbers of
workers and stimulate continued rapid economic growth. Government investment
plans include spending us$200 billion turning the city of Chongqing in
southwestern China into a transportation and industrial hub near what had
been (until these and other government development plans were announced)
the world’s single largest infrastructural investment, the us$30 billion Three
Gorges Dam (Kahn 2003). The Chinese government is investing us$60 billion
in new road construction during the end of the 1990s and early 2000s, us$30
billion on railroad construction during the same period (33 Metalproducing
1998: 42), and billions more on port construction