Across the country, China is spending $100 billion on infrastructure, twice the amount President Obama has requested in the United States. The Shanghai skyline, with its towering skyscrapers, was built in record time, just two decades. Large projects, like a sixteen-lane bridge, are completed in the time it takes just to acquire the building permits in the U.S. Just last week, 200 workers built a 15-story hotel in six days, using prefabricated pieces that snapped together like Lego building blocks.
Chinese engineering is speeding ahead in other areas, outdoing American efforts. By the end of next year, a train from Beijing to Shanghai will take just four hours. It will cover a distance equivalent to that between New York and Atlanta, a trip that takes Americans 18 hours. These latest displays of engineering ingenuity. (Source: Eric Noll and Jennifer Metz, ABCNews.go.com, Nov 15, 2010).