FROM EIR DAILY ALERT
Invest over $1.5 Trillion in Infrastructure? No Problem—At Least Not in China
Feb. 25, 2018 (EIRNS)—“A slew of big projects, with total investment of more than 10 trillion yuan ($1.58 trillion), are about to kick off in a number of Chinese provinces and regions in the new year,” China Daily reported Feb. 24. Most of the projects, the publication said,
“will be in strategic and emerging industries, such as high-end equipment manufacturing and information technology, as well as infrastructure construction related to transportation and energy including the building of high-speed railways and airports.”
For example, Shandong province in eastern China—about halfway between Beijing and Shanghai—will be launching some 900 projects with a total investment of about $400 billion. Liu Jiayi, Communist Party chief of Shandong province, stated:
“Upgrading industrial structure is a hard fight that we must win. We will speed up fostering emerging industries and upgrading traditional sectors, while axing outdated capacity, to improve our economic growth quality and competitiveness.”
China Daily explained that local governments are “shifting their development strategies in accordance with the call by the country’s top leadership for high-quality development,” although the projects “will also offer strong support for traditional industries, such as construction machinery, coal and steel.”
By way of contrast, the recently surfaced so-called White House infrastructure plan calls for $200 billion in federal government spending on infrastructure, which would then somehow leverage $1.3 trillion in additional state and private sector spending—although no one has yet explained how that is supposed to happen under conditions of a bankrupt trans-Atlantic financial system, that is asphyxiating under nearly $2 quadrillion in speculative financial aggregates.
