Already the provider of more loans to developing countries than the World Bank, according to research by the Financial Times, China finances numerous agricultural, hydropower, housing, railway, roadworks and mining projects in the region, particularly in Cambodia, Laos, Burma, Vietnam and the Philippines.
3. HOW WE LIVED (The housing: railway terminals, military barracks, schools -- walls out of military blankets).
"One of the things you should not cut when the economy is fragile is building houses, railways, and new energy networks," he says.
Roth is fascinated by frantic movement - motor traffic, the view from the S-Bahn into houses, railway junctions, aviation, endurance cycle races.
"There were railway hotels, office-houses, lodging-houses, boarding-houses; railway plans, maps, views … There was even railway time observed in clocks, as if the sun itself had given in".
The housing, roads, railways and infrastructure supporting this shift required massive imports of minerals.China's steel production grew by 16% a year between 2000 and 2011.
Chinese contractors have built some housing and railway lines and the projects were at first financed by the syndicate.
Elephants have tramped these routes for generations but as they are blocked – by houses, roads, railways and other linear developments – so human-elephant conflict arises.
With a magnitude of 8.8, it was 500 times more powerful than the one that devastated Haiti weeks earlier; its force was felt across a huge swathe of southern and central Chile,wrecking houses, bridges, railways, roads – and lives.
