In recent years, a series of super equipment and super projects have created world miracles. In major infrastructure projects such as roads, islands, tunnels, and vehicles, China is at the forefront of the world and is leading these advanced technologies abroad to benefit the globe. Behind each challenge to the "impossible," what kind of super Chinese strength is there?
It can be said that China, developing rapidly at present, is fascinating the world.
This Saturday night is the first episode of "In-depth Finance." Starting this week, we will take you deep into industries to uncover the secrets of the financial frontier, record the ups and downs of business figures, and reveal market legends and mysteries!
A program with in-depth investigation, expressive attitude, and warm discoveries—so what are our investigation and discoveries this week? It's a reveal!
Challenge in the Desert
In May, the Arabian Peninsula enters its hottest season of the year. Equipment engineer Zhou Xiang is driving to a construction site 60 kilometers away. In the center of this desert, the 100-square-kilometer Jazan Economic City has begun to take shape. This is Saudi Arabia's second-largest industrial city. In the future, it will be an important economic pivot for Saudi Arabia's trade connecting Europe and Asia. Arriving at the same time as Zhou Xiang is this Chinese engineering team. They are to build the most important infrastructure in this new desert city: a circulating water system. This pumping task is a huge test of the boom's pressure-bearing capacity.
The base's pouring surface is 40 meters wide, with only one side available for the pump truck to park. This requires the pump truck's boom to be at least 40 meters long and fully extended horizontally to pour all the way to the outermost edge of the base. The longer the pump truck's boom, the greater the pressure it bears.
Horizontal pumping puts 3 to 4 times more pressure on the boom than vertical pumping. The boom must be made of a special high-strength steel. Currently, only four countries in the world can manufacture this kind of pump truck. The core technology for manufacturing the powerful boom that helps Saudi Arabia challenge extreme working conditions is in this factory. Yi Xiaogang is leading his team to challenge higher-strength steel booms.
High-strength steel plates are being processed in the workshop; they will be used to build a new generation of "king of pump trucks." To manufacture the boom of the new generation 86-meter ultra-long pump truck, the steel strength must reach 1800 MPa. This means each square centimeter of steel plate must withstand 18 tons of pressure—equivalent to lifting an adult African elephant with just one finger. Each control panel represents a zone of a heating furnace, and the temperature of each zone is rigorously calculated to ensure the steel plate is heated evenly. The secret of processing high-strength steel lies in these temperature parameters; a slight deviation makes a big difference in steel strength. 64 streams of coolant impact the steel plate simultaneously from both sides, each with a different flow rate and speed. Each steel plate is nearly 40 square meters. To ensure every inch of the steel plate cools at an absolutely uniform temperature, the temperature difference must not exceed plus or minus 1 degree Celsius. In 20 seconds, the transformation from ordinary steel to high-strength steel is completed.
Ultra-high-strength steel raw materials are a trend in the development of the international construction machinery industry. The ultra-high-strength steel produced by Yi Xiaogang and his team has reached the world's advanced level.
With sharp tools, good workers accomplish their tasks. China's newly developed technologies and equipment have become a sight on global infrastructure sites. They are taking the world to new heights.
Challenging the Skyline
In Kuala Lumpur, not far from the Petronas Twin Towers, a new landmark tower is being completed in the hands of Chinese engineers.
This is currently the world's tallest building constructed by China overseas. When completed, it will be 438.20 meters tall and will refresh Malaysia's city skyline.
This is the 50th floor of the Malaysian landmark tower. Today, Zhang Ye will lead the workers to challenge a higher floor.
Chinese construction wisdom is here. This is a new integrated hydraulic lifting material platform from China. This big guy can bear a load of 50 tons and can stack all the materials needed to build an entire floor on the platform at once.
This multi-layer system is called "climbing formwork," an essential system for super high-rise buildings. The upper layer stores building materials, and the lower space is for workers to construct, greatly improving construction efficiency. Hydraulic devices have long been a weak point in China's construction technology. Now this integrated hydraulic lifting material platform, unique to China, has become world-class equipment.
Relying on advanced equipment technology, this landmark tower now rises one floor every three days on average.
More than 2,000 foreign employees on this super project come from Malaysia and neighboring countries. Learning the world's most advanced construction technology is what makes them happiest.
Faheem from Bangladesh used to sell vegetables and do odd jobs before coming to the site and was a complete layman in construction. Now he is the most skilled worker on the site.
Deng Xiao, Faheem's Chinese mentor, taught him hand-in-hand how to overhaul generators. With these skills, even after the project ends, he won't have to worry about unemployment. Now he has begun to plan his future seriously.
The "Century Railway" on the East African Savanna
The East African savanna is rich in resources. Every year, more than 24 million tons of goods are transported from here. This is the transportation throat of all East Africa, but it still uses tracks built by the British 100 years ago—a meter-gauge railway only one meter wide, with a speed of less than 30 kilometers per hour.
Not far away, a new railway is under construction. This is the first railway built overseas by the Chinese using Chinese standards.
The Mombasa-Nairobi Railway connects Kenya's capital Nairobi with Mombasa, East Africa's largest port, with a total length of about 480 kilometers. The 142 kilometers crossing the savanna is the most complex section of the Mombasa-Nairobi Railway. Zhang Chi is the project manager for this section of the railway. He must shorten the construction period to minimize the impact on animals. The nearly 2,000-meter Tsavo River Bridge spans the national park and is the longest-span bridge on the entire Mombasa-Nairobi Railway. Even the shortest pier is 9.5 meters tall, ensuring that 6-meter-tall giraffes can pass freely beneath the bridge.
George is an expert from the Kenya Wildlife Service and also the environmental assessment specialist for the Mombasa-Nairobi Railway.
Cao Fangwen is the chief commander of the erection site. This is the first bridge on the Mombasa-Nairobi Railway. At this moment, the final two steel girders are being erected.
Cao Fangwen and Zhang Chi are both just over 40 years old, but they have participated in erecting more bridges than engineers who have worked abroad for 40 years. Equipment, technology, and talent—these are the strength and confidence behind creating Chinese speed. The speed of Chinese railway construction enabled the 480-kilometer Mombasa-Nairobi Railway to be completed ahead of schedule in less than three years. This is Kenya's largest infrastructure project in a century, the "Century Railway" in the hearts of the Kenyan people. Elizabeth began learning train driving five months ago. She is one of Kenya's first female train drivers. In the carriage, Maasai village chief Jeremiah deliberately brought the whole village to ride the train. The train is about four times faster than before, but the ticket price is half that of the local long-distance bus, less than 50 yuan.
When roads are open, all businesses thrive. From the end of the road network to a regional hub, the Mombasa-Nairobi Railway is making Kenya a more efficient East African trade corridor.
The Mombasa-Nairobi Railway is only the initial section of the East African railway network. There are still more than 2,000 kilometers of railway waiting for Chinese engineers to arrive, which will connect six countries: Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, and South Sudan.
Go alone fast, go together far. Co-building and sharing—more cooperation roads are continuously extending on the open map.
Super Steel Piles Set a Record
The connectivity of railways, highways, and bridges brings smooth logistics and economic development. In the past five years, a series of Chinese bridges, while bringing convenience to people, have also demonstrated the Chinese charm of bridge construction technology. Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, is home to 15 million residents. It is one of the most congested cities in the world, and traffic is the biggest problem here.
The Padma River, which runs through Dhaka, is the water of life that nurtures the local people, but it is also a huge barrier to the country's north-south economy.
Ferries are the only means of transportation connecting Dhaka with two provinces and 21 districts in southern Bangladesh. Departures have been shortened to one every two minutes, but still cannot meet demand. The efficiency of goods exchange between the north and south banks by ferry is extremely low. Once the rainy season brings wind and waves, transportation can stop at any time. Not far away, a 6-kilometer-long river-crossing bridge, the Padma Bridge, has begun construction in the hands of Chinese engineers.
This road-rail dual-purpose bridge, once completed, will not only connect northern and southern Bangladesh but also become an important hub for Bangladesh direct to China, Myanmar, and India. The first important project milestone has arrived.
Engineer Shen Tao and his colleagues are about to drive the world's longest and heaviest steel pile into the Padma riverbed.
Building a bridge over the Padma River is itself a world-class challenge.
Bangladesh is located on the delta formed by the alluvial deposits of the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers, a typical alluvial zone. At a water depth of 110 meters below the Padma riverbed, it is still soft mud and silt, with no hard rock to be found.
Moreover, the water flow here can reach 5 meters per second, faster than the Yangtze River during flood peaks. To build a bridge in such currents and on a soft mud riverbed, the main structure of the bridge piers—the steel piles—must be at least 120 meters long to ensure the bridge is as stable as Mount Tai. This is a construction plan that stuns the world: the Chinese will divide the 120-meter steel pile into two sections for combined installation.
Before this, international bridge-building giants from the United States, Japan, and South Korea had all hesitated in the face of this problem.
Because there is no lifting equipment in the world that can complete the vertical hoisting of a 120-meter-long giant steel structure component, and there has never been successful experience in constructing a steel pile in two sections. Today, the Chinese are turning a theoretical construction plan into reality. 20 hours of continuous operation. On the Padma River, the wind speed and current at night are calmer than during the day, so welding is chosen at night. Overhead welding is done entirely manually.
On a 20-meter-high platform, three welders must fuse the two steel pile sections into one. They are breaking the international curse that 100-meter steel piles cannot be constructed.
The steel pile has a circumference of nearly 10 meters, and welding lasted a full 9 hours. The next hurdle tests the strength of the weld. The weld must reach or even exceed the strength of the steel pile body itself to withstand the hammering.
The sound of the hydraulic hammer striking the steel pile resounds over the Padma River again. This time, the striking lasts nearly 4 hours longer than the first. To reduce the heat generated, water must be continuously injected to cool the steel pile.
After long hours of striking, the weld—nearly 10 meters long, 6 centimeters thick, and 5 centimeters wide—shows not a single crack. After 48 hours, the world's largest bridge main pier steel pile—120 meters long, 3 meters in diameter, and 550 tons in total weight—is firmly embedded 120 meters deep in the riverbed.
This is a new world record created by 600 engineers and skilled workers from China and an equipment cluster of more than 70 machines. By the Padma River, in a 12,000-square-meter prefabrication plant, workers are stepping up production of the second steel pile. In the future, the Padma Bridge will need a total of 240 such giant steel piles.
Among the factory's employees, 70% are local Bangladeshis.
With the help of Chinese mentors, they have gradually mastered the know-how of manufacturing giant steel piles.
They will be the backbone of Bangladesh's first batch of engineering construction teams. In their hearts, the Padma Bridge is the hope for this country's economic takeoff.
Chinese engineers and workers are showing the world what it truly means to "do great things." Behind these improvements in strength and capability is the strong support of national economic construction and development. Infrastructure projects marked with China are becoming China's national calling cards, moving across the country and into the world with resounding steps!