BEIJING — Rising out of the farmlands of southern Beijing in a web of concrete, rebar and glass, one of the world’s largest airports is preparing to open after just five years of construction — a striking contrast to the infrastructure travails of far richer places. (See: New York City, subway; Britain, train service; Berlin, airport.)

Just as impressive as its speed are the airport’s broader goals. It is meant to shift the Chinese capital’s center of gravity away from its high-tech university district in the north toward its poorer southern suburbs — part of an even more ambitious plan to remake Beijing and its hinterland into an 82,000-square-mile economic locomotive for northern China. And it will do so by relocating thousands of residents with few protests, at least so far.

Yet the airport also reflects a less glamorous side of China’s rapid change: a reliance on the heavy hand of big infrastructure as a salve for deeper problems in politics and economics.

These intractable problems include an overbearing military, whose dominance of Chinese airspace hobbles existing airports, as well as a broad retreat from market-driven economic reforms, leading to a dependence on infrastructure investment to increase growth.