China’s Cities Are Buried in Debt, but They Keep Shoveling It On

But Shangqiu is not planning to spend the money on public services. On the contrary, the city plans to cut spending on education, health care, employment protection, transportation and many other public services, according to budget documents on its website.

“We should protect and improve the public’s livelihood based on our economic growth and financial health,” the documents said.

China is full of wasteful infrastructure that the government likes to brag about but that doesn’t serve the most urgent needs of the public.

The Chinese government likes to say the country has the longest and fastest high-speed railways in the world. But except for a couple of lines that connect the megacities of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, most lines operate below capacity and at a great loss. About 80 percent of China’s high-speed railways constructed in the past decade were built in distant and poor regions, China State Railway Group said last year.

Zhao Jian, a professor at Beijing Jiaotong University, warned in an article that high-speed railways could become the “gray rhino” that crushed the Chinese economy because many local governments had taken on a lot of debt to build them. But most of those railways move people, not freight. So they would make sense only in densely populated areas where people were willing to pay more for speed.

Local leaders are interested in infrastructure projects because their economic payoff, while minimal, is immediate — people get construction jobs, and companies get building contracts. Such a short-term approach dominates in China’s political system, in which cadres are deployed to run toward the goal set by their leader regardless of the financial or human cost.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/28/business/china-local-finances-debt.html