W10 - The Logic of National Projects

The state recently launched “East Data, West Computing.” Similar to that, we have many national-level projects, each often a multi-decade megaproject. From the perspective of the nation, how are these megaprojects organized, and what do they ultimately serve? I’ve had some reflections on this recently. Thinking about these questions now also helps restore confidence—after all, “green and flourishing, yet my heart is anxious”—a self-made dose of reassurance.

National-level projects must serve national strategies. I tentatively divide the problems national strategy addresses into three domains: survival, development, and influence.

Projects addressing survival issues generally revolve around the main thread of “security,” covering policies on food, national defense, energy, international finance, and related areas.Survival is a first-principles issue and usually takes precedence when it conflicts with development. Many policies and phenomena we find puzzling in daily life can often be traced back to survival concerns. For example, in many parts of China where the economy is not particularly strong, you may still find one or two central enterprises or research institutes that seem out of place. Specifically, companies like Pangang, which sit almost on the third tier, are products of the Third Front construction. Beginning in the 1970s, China carried out a 15-year Third Front construction. To address the hostile international situation with the US and the Soviet Union at the time and to build strategic depth, many machinery manufacturers and research institutes were relocated from the relatively developed eastern coastal plains to the central and western interior. Although conditions were harsh and the difficulties many, the goal was to avoid repeating the mistakes of the Anti-Japanese War by sacrificing short-term economic development to achieve strategic defense. The mistake in the Anti-Japanese War was that we lacked strategic depth; once the Japanese advanced, they quickly seized our weapons manufacturing capacity, and we were forced to cobble together institutions like the Southwest Associated University.

Development issues mostly concern the economy and people’s livelihoods.China’s terrain is largely mountainous and hilly, with transportation barriers, highly uneven distribution of resources and population, and ecological degradation. Only national-level projects can adequately address these challenges. Hence the various campaigns to “restructure the landscape,” solving connectivity, reorganization, and ecological restoration problems. Examples include the eight horizontal-eight vertical rail and road networks, north-to-south coal transport, west-to-east gas transmission, and the South-to-North Water Diversion Project; East Data, West Computing can also be placed in this category.

Influence projects are generally implemented through a few representative flagship initiatives that realize national aspirations.For instance, we spent 20 years arranging and deploying satellites to build the BeiDou Navigation Satellite System. Another example is the manned space program—Shenzhou. From the launch of Shenzhou 1 in 1999 to last year’s Shenzhou 11, over two decades we progressed from unmanned to manned missions, from one person for one day to multiple people for many days, and from spacewalks to rendezvous and docking. After the International Space Station is decommissioned in 2024, China will be the only country with an operational space station.

Finally, any national-level project has an extremely long cycle, often spanning generations. The Three-North Shelterbelt Program we learned about in elementary school has a planned duration of 73 years and will not conclude until 2050. Compared with companies and individuals, the state needs even more patience to accomplish something significant.