More Ghost Projects? China’s $350 million ‘Bridge to Nowhere’

From a post I wrote a few hours back

Last week I noted that state owned companies have been taking over property activities in Guangzhou which should add to the existing glut of inventories. The same article says that: Big-ticket spending is already picking up: Since mid-October, Chinese authorities have approved railway and airport projects valued at 845 billion yuan ($138 billion).

It is unclear whether this has been part of the announced mini stimulus. In the past the Chinese government has vehemently denied that this will be in the same amount of the 2008 stimulus at $586 billion. But when one begins to add up spending here and there, injections here and there, these may eventually lead up even more than 2008

Yet again the Chinese government will be expanding ghost projects just to attain their 7+% statistical growth target.

Well, it  appears that China has a $350 million 'bridge to nowhere'.

According to the New York Post

The bridge was supposed to be a key link for trade and travel between China’s underdeveloped northeast provinces and a much-touted special economic zone in North Korea — so key that Beijing sank more than $350 million into it.

Now, it is beginning to look like Beijing has built a bridge to nowhere.

An Associated Press Television News crew in September saw nothing but a dirt ramp at the North Korean end of the bridge, surrounded by open fields. No immigration or customs buildings could be seen. Roads to the bridge had not been completed.

The much-awaited opening of the new bridge over the Yalu River came and passed on Oct. 30 with no sign the link would be ready for business anytime soon. That prompted an unusually sharp report in the Global Times — a newspaper affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party — quoting residents in the Chinese city of Dandong expressing anger over delays in what they had hoped would be an economic boom for their border city.

The report suggested the opening of the mammoth, 3-kilometer bridge has been postponed “indefinitely.”

While the 'bridge to nowhere' may have a geopolitical component—"Foreign analysts have suggested the apparent lack of progress might indicate wariness in Pyongyang over China’s economic influence in the country, which has been growing substantially in recent years as Pyongyang has become more isolated from other potential partners over its nuclear program, human rights record and other political issues"—it doesn’t negate the fact that taxpayer money and resources had been squandered from central planning miscalculation and from the reckless use of the other people's money.

Also this adds to the growing list of China’s malinvestments or ghost projects.