China’s plan to build the longest underwater tunnel on the planet | Hacker News Reader

China’s plan to build the longest underwater tunnel on the planet

qz.com

What's crazy about it? I resent that headline. Doing big things should be applauded. Good on them.

You want crazy? America binding itself hand and foot with its bullshit Chicago School economic idealogy, that's crazy. It is absolute frigging nonsense and will be the ruin of the country. Now watch everyone else eat its breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Note: This tunnel would "cost" china less than one month of the USA's "quantitative easing". For whatever "cost" means to a government that can print its own money. The hilarious thing is, the USA can't pump that money into infrastructure projects because of their stupid, stupid political aversion to a misunderstood fear of SOCIALISM! So they have to funnel everything through the banks. China doesn't give a shit, pumps money straight into infrastructure. At the end of the day, China has the infrastructure, the USA has what? Some banker's bonuses and another thousand foreclosed houses. So what were you saying about "crazy"?

First, "crazy" isn't automatically a negative term. It can even be seen as positive. Apple used the word in a ad campaign[1] early in Steve Job's[2] return.

As to the infrastructure, it really has nothing to do with some fear of socialism. It is very much the problem of cost s, regulatory hurdles, and (increasingly) lack of skilled workers to carry out the construction. Court costs are the biggest killer. Every group is going to bring a lawsuit in any big infrastructure project. China doesn't have to worry about that[3].

For all the talk, if high speed rail was $1 million per mile and we had no lawsuits, we would have the things all over the place.

1) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjgtLSHhTPg

2) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syhEFKuX5yI

3) sometimes this hurts more than helps when problems arise in the project

> It is very much the problem of ...and (increasingly) lack of skilled workers to carry out the construction.

I don't think a major construction project anywhere else in the world exclusively uses homegrown labour and technology. Are you implying that the US can't/won't hire german/dutch/japanese/chinese engineers for infrastructure projects?

When the whole world is your labour market, lack of skilled labour can't be an excuse.

Engineers do not build infrastructure projects. They design them and supervise. I am talking about the people who can actually do welding, plumbing, construction, etc.

Its not exactly easy to get foreign workers into the US to do vocational work. Projects around the oil fields in ND are delayed or cancelled because of a lack of workers. Heck, the oil companies are currently recruiting in Canada.

In that Apple ad, 'crazy' is used as a negative. "While some may see crazy ones, we see -foo-". They're saying that what others call crazy, we see as not crazy.

They also only used example of people who proved their success decades before the ad aired, basically capitalising on hindsight and not making even the slightest of bets. None of those people were thought of as crazy when the ad aired - and of course, they weren't going to predict a few contemporary crazies because betting on crazy is generally a losing bet when you don't benefit from selection bias.

I have never interpreted that commercial to mean crazy in the sense you mean. People make crazy bets all the time and they sometimes payoff. We celebrate the crazy successes. Crazy isn't the problem, failure is.

This really comes down to the need/demand for the infrastructure. Projects like this do occasionally happen in the US. NYC is getting a 60 mile long, $6B water tunnel. Unfortunately, that tunnel has been under construction for decades, and is still years from completion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Water_Tunnel_No._...

Well, we do have the world's longest bridge over water: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Pontchartrain_Causeway

Not that world-record holding structures should be an indicator of economic stability, as China is notoriously bad about using them to artificially inflate their GDP at the cost of their citizenry.

It's not about who's the record-holder. It's about the whole concept of a central government seeing that investment in infrastructure benefits the country - and the economy - as a whole. The USA that built this bridge - in the 1950s and 60s - was completely different from today. The USA of today could never build this bridge, or any other large project.

yep, it was the USA of Moon landing.

I don't think it is, see : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest_bridges_in_the_...

Also this list is way more interesting imo : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest_suspension_brid...

Well maybe the US should peg its dollar to the Yuan and see what kind of "crazy" things we could do with the surplus?

Maybe we could buy Taiwan?

Doing big things should be applauded

Err...

You sound like a college freshman who heard some words that professors and talking heads on TV say and regurgitate them into your speech without comprehension.

Thanks. You sound like you have some vague disagreement about what I said, but can't express it in any meaningful way, so instead you came up with that.

Sigh, its sad to see the technology stuff getting side swiped in the comments by ideological rhetoric.

A 76 mile tunnel, under water, is an ambitious effort. Just like tunneling through a mountain in Switzerland [1] was an ambitious effort.

What these projects do is advance the knowledge we have of how to build tunnels (which since we don't do them all that often is very precious knowledge). The notion of having it be a covered trench tunnel like Boston's Big Dig is interesting although at the depths they are talking about it might be interesting to make a semi-floating tube type tunnel. Either way, taking on the challenge is intrinsically interesting to people who are amazed by very large infrastructure projects.

[1] http://news.discovery.com/tech/worlds-largest-tunnel-drilled...

Sigh, its sad to see the technology stuff getting side swiped in the comments by ideological rhetoric.

Seriously. I mean, I'm personally very glad to see NSA-gate, &c getting discussed here, but the incessant sniping, relevant or not — hell, informed or not — is really starting to sour my experience of HN.

I do hope you weren't talking about my comment. I would not like to think I was contributing to this perceived decline in HN standards.

I wrote what I did because I took a kind of offence at the assumptions baked into the article. I felt large parts of it were concerned with a kind of condescending, "tut-tut" economic opinion - look at what these crazy chinese are wasting their money on! And this opinion seemed to be rooted in what I consider to be a profoundly flawed economic theory, which I wanted to raise questions about.

I'm sorry I derailed the discussion about this interesting project, though. I've been through the Seikan tunnel a number of times and it's an absolute wonder of engineering (do you know there are 2 stations inside?). But I couldn't let the article's smug little swipes at those wacky Chinamen go unchallenged. Perhaps, for the good of the community, I (and everyone else) should have.

I do hope the Chinese share what they learn. Particularly how they solve the earthquake resisting stuff. Could be very useful.

One thing about this compared to the political stuff... It is easier for most people to comment on politics, its just opinion. But with things like this, its very hard for the average person to find something useful or interesting to say over and above, "hey , very cool". Indeed, I am worried what I said above proved this!!!

It bears pointing out that we don't even know yet whether or not this will even be built. There must have been something learned in the construction of the world's current longest undersea tunnel,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seikan_Tunnel

and one thing the whole world learned from that is that such projects can take decades from planning to completion.

A tunnel 76 mi long is "crazy"? Is this the first Chinese infrastructure project the writer has heard about?

108 Chinese Infrastructure Projects: http://www.businessinsider.com/108-giant-chinese-infrastruct...

There are a couple of projects at the end that are 10X the cost of this tunnel.

$200 Billion (5x the cost of this project) spent in 2012 on roads: http://money.cnn.com/gallery/news/world/2013/05/23/china-inf...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_Tunnel

it's only 2x as long as the chunnel. this isn't mind-boggling stuff here, it's just that everyone hates china/chinese people and it generates a ton of traffic.

One country invests $USD 42 Billion for infrastructure that will last decades, the other spends that much for a few months of an ill-defined war and spying on its own people.

Which one is the USA and which one is China? Depends which century you're talking about I guess.

We'll see if this works as well as previous infrastructure projects in China.

"Liu Zhijun, China's ex-railway minister, sentenced to death for corruption"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/08/liu-zhijun-sente...

"China’s Bridge Collapse: Infrastructure Boom Raises Safety Questions"

http://world.time.com/2012/08/27/bridge-collapse-in-china-ra...

"China failed to heed rail safety warnings"

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/bbd56722-b78c-11e0-b95d-00144feabd...

"Grieving Chinese Parents Protest School Collapse"

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/17/world/asia/17china.html

About the specific proposed project mentioned in the link kindly submitted here, other news reports

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/07/11/us-china-tunnel-id...

mention

"China announced plans in 1994 to build the tunnel, at a cost of $10 billion, and set to be completed before 2010. But more than 20 years on, the project remains stuck in the planning stage, the website said, without elaborating."

Luckily the United States have no infrastructure problems.

tokenadult isn't saying the US is perfect. He knows China better than most. In China, these kinds of projects are riddled with corruption. They're practically for theft primarily, and only secondarily for whatever their stated purpose is.

After the railway minister thing, I imagine people will be a little more cagey for a while... ><

Curious question. How does one get proper air flow in a tunnel that long?

A tube for each direction helps a bit, as cars or trains will push air around. That certainly won't be enough, though.

The Chunnel uses the service tunnel for ventilation (http://www.brighthubengineering.com/structural-engineering/8...) Wikipedia also claims ventilation issues were an argument to build it as a train tunnel, rather than a car one.

A tower every 10 kilometers?

These tunnel boring machines are one of humanities greatest achievements.

Look at their size: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hamburg.Trude.wmt.jpg

It took 3 years for men and mules working 24 hours a day 6 days a week to dig a 2 mile tunnel out under Lake Michigan for Chicago's clean water in 1865. It was heralded as the 8th wonder of the world.

Wow, this is a really interesting project. As someone who used to live next to the port in Dalian I'm really curious what the motivation of this project is.

The article mentions it'll generate $3.7b pa, but I assume a big chunk of that revenue will come at the expense of the local shipping route from Dalian to Yantai & Weihai.

From a logistical standpoint I'm scratching my head a little. There's not a huge amount of demand for a container to start in Dalian and finish in Yantai; so justifying a big time saving on that basis seems odd.

China does have a tendency to build a lot of stuff to bump up their GBP and production output to keep people employed and avoid civil unrest. Even so, I'd love to see this get built, but probably will still take the boat.

Well, I have no idea about what the true demand is for this project, but I random article I pulled up on this project claims that today the estimated traffic between the two cities is at least between 30-40k cars/day (http://house.qingdaonews.com/content/2013-07/12/content_9853...). Apparently, the current infrastructure is ill-equipped to handle this, so that some trucks will actually still choose to go the land route. Also, there is something called a train ferry transporting trains across the sea? I had no idea.

> Also, there is something called a train ferry transporting trains across the sea? I had no idea.

There are certainly such things, sometimes amazingly seamless, though I've only seen them for passenger trains. Freight trains do tend to present different tradeoffs...

Good to see China looking at the long term economic benefits from undertaking such projects.

I've travelled (and lived!) quite a lot in Shandong province.

The area slightly west of Yantai, where the tunnel is apparently supposed to land (judging by the map in the article), is known as Penglai. This area was a small historic port near a promontary that used to be known in Chinese literature as where the eight immortals cross the ocean. This is apparently due to visual phenomena during certain weather conditions that make it appear as if there are magically appearing islands offshore. It's also claimed by some (perhaps local tourist authorities, only) to be where China's first totalitarian ruler, Qin Shi Huang, sent hundreds of young children out in to the ocean in search of his own immortality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penglai_City

Unfortunately, what used to be a beautiful area (a hugely historic small fishing port, and lots of old architecture) was ... in the manner of so many historic potential tourist attractions across China ... completely flattened and then rebuilt as a "new" old town by the local authorities; complete with surrounding wall!

Some shots of the destruction: http://pratyeka.org/penglai-destroyed/ .. I have shots from prior to the destruction, but not online. Basically it was a vibrant port with an ancient history.

Also nearby in Shandong province are some lesser known (and some relatively well known) attractions:

(1) the world soccer federation approved (great pictures of cafe-dining on a Swiss junket in the museum there!) original home of football (the Chinese invented everything, you know!), in Linzi.

(2) the ancient capital of Qingzhou, the site of the 1996 discovery of the largest hoard of Buddhist statuary of the entire 20th century, some Buddhist carved mountain grottoes, and some of the oldest mosques in the country; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qingzhou [MY PICK]

(3) the historical (Tang Dynasty; ~1000 years ago) route of Ennin (Yuanren), a Japanese Buddhist monk who travelled by ship to China in search of Buddhist lore, recorded his direct observations in colloquial Chinese (perhaps to sharpen his language), and has since become one of the most important sources on the average person's lot during what is commonly considered to be China's apex era; the Tang. Interested hackers can can follow a previous retracing of his steps that I helped to facilitate: http://pratyeka.org/ennin/

(4) the waters of Zhang Bogo, a Korean Chinese pirate captain who grew to significant fame operating off the east of the peninsula at about the same time; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jang_Bogo

(5) Taishan, one of the most sacred mountains of China; particularly used by ancient emperors; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taishan

(6) Qufu, the home of Confucius (unversally hated by travellers for its strange, endemic hassle; but some nice sculptures in the temple and massive outdoor family mausoleum) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qufu

(7) The Grand Canal that linked historic northern and southern China, primarily for supporting the north with the year-round agricultural produce of the south; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Canal_%28China%29

(8) Dezhou, an otherwise uninteresting little town on the Grand Canal which was the final resting place for a Philippino muslim Sultan who came to visit the Chinese emperor and is sometimes thought to have been poisoned by the Chinese state .. possibly in retribution for not showing enough deferential respect for the emperor .. on his homeward journey; his flunkies decided to settle to protect the tomb and take local wives; thus many locals are partly descended from Phillipinos! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dezhou

(9) The former German treaty port of Qingdao, with some nice architecture and China's most famous beer; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qingdao

(10) The former British treaty port of Weihai, where well to do Shanghai residents took their summer holidays; this featured prominently in later wars; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weihai

(11) Much of China's wine production. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shandong#Wine_industry

(12) The site of Fa Xian's landing in 412. Fa Xian was one of the most important of the few well recorded pilgrims in early Chinese history who went to India in search of Buddhist scriptures; thus paving the way for Buddhism's further expansion (including to Japan and Korea). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faxian

All in all, an interesting part of China. Though largely destroyed by industrial development these days, it hides some fascinating history for the motivated.

whether it will be a underwater tunnel or a bridge or a combination is still in planning stage, definitely it has lower priority than another tunnel which connect Hainan province and the mainland, so this bohaiwan one will never come into true before 2020.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com