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“When lunch break comes at the construction site between Shanghai and Suzhou in eastern China, Xi Tong-li and his fellow laborers bolt for some nearby trees and the merciful slivers of shade they provide. It’s 95 degrees and humid — a typically oppressive summer day in southeastern China — but it’s not just mad dogs and Englishmen who go out in the midday sun.

Xi is among a vast army of workers in China — according to Beijing’s Railroad Ministry, 110,000 were laboring on a single line, the Beijing-Shanghai route, at the beginning of 2009 — who are building one of the largest infrastructure projects in history: a nationwide high-speed passenger rail network that, once completed, will be the largest, fastest, and most technologically sophisticated in the world. “

(emphasis mine)

(Via China’s amazing new bullet train.)

How’s that for a stimulus? 110,000 workers? The article goes on to say that China is spending $300 billion dollars on the project, which will take 15 years to complete.