It snowed in China. Quite a lot in fact. The effects were pretty severe, including massive transport delays and a stampede in a railway station. WSJ:

the jolt delivered by the bad weather shows how little slack there is in a Chinese economy dependent on just-in-time deliveries of coal and other commodities to fuel its rapid expansion. The economy grew 11.4% last year, its fastest rate since 1994, though economists say it may slow somewhat this year as global demand slackens.

China has been hard-pressed to build the infrastructure and acquire the fuels necessary to sustain this galloping pace, despite enormous investments in highways, railroads, power stations and the electricity-transmission grid.

“Electricity consumption has been growing rapidly,” Tan Rongyao, a spokesman for the State Electricity Regulatory Commission, said during a news conference in Beijing on Tuesday to discuss the weather disaster. “The shortage of power-generating coal has become enormously acute.”

Gu Junyuan, chief engineer of the electricity commission, said total demand for electricity in China increased 20.2% annually between 2001 and 2007. Installed generating capacity, on the other hand, grew by about 18.5% a year over the period.

When snow and ice started falling in mid-January, high-tension wires and pylons were downed, leading to power outages. The bad weather also delayed shipments of coal to the generating stations that were still online, and electricity shortages spread.

We sometimes forget just how primitive is the Chinese infrastructure, only to be reminded when the country is so disrupted by relatively predictable events.

It’s hard to believe for example that while the US has 20,000 airports, with 5,000 for commercial use, China has 150 or so airports for civilian use. It will only have 250 airports by 2020. When commentators say that China is no longer 70% dependent on exports for its growth, they might be exaggerating things a bit in a country whose infrastructure is in such a primitive condition.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 5th, 2008 at 1:52 pm and is filed under China, General, business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.