ABSTRACT
Guangdong was the pilot province in China for economic reform in the 1980s, and its economic development is among the most advanced. In the early 1990s, Guangdong Province started reform in highway construction and was the first in China to implement the concept of toll roads for finance and management, called as “loans for expressways and tolls to repay the loans.” This speeded up the long-planned Guangzhou-Shantou automobile-only highway project and made it a model project for highway construction in China. However, the biggest engineering challenge to this project was to build a major bridge crossing Shantou Bay in order to connect the city of Shantou directly. Therefore, the Shantou Bay Bridge became the critical point that needed to be started first to ensure the success and schedule of the entire project.
