Welcome to the club of big boys! Chinese engineering companies are snatching ever bigger projects overseas.

I was speaking last night with a European executive who helped arrange a recent deal – the world’s largest road project in Algeria. It’s a $7 billion project, and the China Railway Construction Corporation is part of the consortium that won the bid earlier this year.

The Chinese consortium beat out huge U.S., Japanese and German firms to clinch the contract for a 330-mile (528 kilometer) stretch of the Algerian East-West Highway.

Chinese contractors are all over Africa, of course. In Algeria, one Chinese company just finished construction of a terminal at the Houari Boumedienne airport in the capital.

On China’s African ventures, here’s what Chinese Commerce Minister Bo Xilai said earlier this month during a Sino-African forum in Beijing:

“In the past 5 years, Chinese enterprises undertook contracts of more that 6,000 kilometers highway construction, over 3,400 kilometers railway construction and reconstruction, establishment of 7 power stations with total generating electricity capacity of 3.4 million kilowatts. The reconstruction of Nigerian railways, Imboulou Hydropower Station of Congo, natural gas pipeline of Libya, telecom network construction of Angola and newly established roadway project of Algeria build up a bridge connecting China and Africa.”