By Guillaume A. W. Attia
December 18, 2025
Introduction:
Read more here: https://www.liberalcurrents.com/china- ... olympus/(Liberal Currents) PART I: OLYMPUS
If one statistic could be deployed to summarize China’s meteoric rise to superpower status over the last 80 years it would be this: Between 2011 and 2013, China both produced and used more cement (6.6 gigatons) than the U.S. did during the entirety of the twentieth century (4.5 gigatons). To be clear, that’s enough cement to bury the Island of Hawaii.
Queen Elizabeth I of England remarked in 1563 that Rome wasn’t built in a day. True enough, but thanks to modern technology, management techniques, and sheer manpower, we now know that it can take as little as 14 days to build concrete artifacts the size of Rome. By 2005, for example, China was building the square-foot equivalent of Rome every two weeks.
On average, China uses 1.32 tons of cement per person. That is three to five times the global average and far more than any other industrial nation in the world. Under its ‘empire of cement’ China built five of the world’s 10 largest hydropower stations, including the world’s largest concrete structure: the Three Gorges Dam.
China’s most ambitious concrete project to date is a century-defining dam which flows through Tibet and connects East and South Asia via India and Bangladesh. The Medog dam is expected to require as much as 150m cubic metres of concrete. That is about 60 times more cement than was used to build the Hoover dam, and ‘‘enough concrete to build a two-lane highway around the Earth five times.’’
The new dam is being set up to generate 70GW of electric power, more than the installed total power capacity of Poland, and enough energy to sustain the British Isles. It will take $167B to build what is slated to be the world’s biggest source of green energy, more dollars in fact than it took to create the International Space Station. Transportation costs alone might require another $100B investment, making it not only the world’s most expansive, but also the most expensive infrastructure project in recorded history.
caltrek’s comment: Part II includes discussion of the Covid crisis in China, its negative impact, and how it was mishandled by Chinese authorities.
