AKIPRESS.COM - Over the weekend, engineers in China's mountainous southwestern Guizhou province linked the two ends of a bridge spanning a rocky gorge. The completion of the Beipanjiang bridge marks yet another infrastructure record in China – the world's "highest" bridge, sitting 1,854 feet above the river below, reports The Washington Post.

The structure it supplants in that ranking is also Chinese – the Si Du River Bridge in central Hubei province.

Though there's no consistent system for the measurement of bridges around the world, China seems to boast a surplus of structures with superlatives. The world's longest bridge. The world's longest transoceanic bridge. The world's second-longest cable-stayed bridge. A plan for the world's longest underwater tunnel. And the list of eye-catching megaprojects goes on and on.

Even though the country's booming economy isn't soaring at its previous heights, Chinese leaders place tremendous stock in such state-led building projects.

“China has always had this history of megaprojects,” Yukon Huang, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told the New York Times in 2015. "It’s part of the blood, the culture, the nature of its society. To have an impact on the country, they’ve got to be big."

In that context, the new bridge in Guizhou is just a tiny piece of a grand vision.