Chinese high speed trains to bring the nation together

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I will miss those old rickety East German trains that took me across the length and breadth of China when I was a mere whipper snapper, but the new Harmonious Bullet Trains are certainly awesome. Newsweek elaborates some more about the future expansion of the high speed network:

For decades, rail travel in China meant an arduous overnighter in a crowded East German–designed train, riding along a rickety old track. Now China is undergoing a rail revolution. Over the next three years, the government will pour some $300 billion into its railways, expanding its network by 20,000 kilometers, including 13,000 kilometers of track designed for high-speed trains capable of traveling up to 350kph. Result: China, a nation long defined by the vastness of its geography, is getting, much, much smaller.

Already, the journey from Beijing to Taiyuan, the capital of Shanxi province, has been slashed from eight hours to three. Shortly before the Olympics last year, the 120km trip from Beijing to Tianjin was cut from almost an hour to just 27 minutes. In the next few years, a train journey from Wuhan to Guangzhou, halfway across the country, will shrink from 10 to three hours. The trip from Shanghai to Beijing, which currently clocks in at 10 grueling hours—and twice that, not so long ago—will be cut to just four, making train travel between China’s two most important cities a viable competitor to air for the first time. Similarly, a trip from the capital to the southern manufacturing powerhouse of Guangzhou—more or less the entire length of the nation—will take just eight hours, compared with 20 before and more than a day and a half by bus.

In many ways, China’s rail revolution is comparable to the building and opening of America’s transcontinental railway in the 19th century or, more recently, to the opening of the U.S. interstate highway system in the 1950s and 1960s. In their own ways, each of those infrastructure projects opened up the United States for development, exploration, and trade. By making travel available to ever-larger numbers of people, they changed not only distances, but individuals’ perceptions of their own limitations, shifting “people’s mental maps of the land mass in which they lived,” says Colin Divall, a professor of railway history at University of York in the U.K.

The advent of high-speed trains is likely to have even greater implications for China, given its larger territory, population, and history of regional unrest. By improving connections, they may help spread economic development more evenly around the country, helping Beijing to bind the nation together and strengthen its hold over the provinces, and decreasing the likelihood that China’s internal divisions might one day lead it to fragmenting into “warring states,” as some worst-case forecasts have predicted. In particular, the leadership hopes that its call for the nation’s talents and industry to “go west” to China’s poorer provinces may become easier once western regions become less remote, thanks to rail. Thus the gaps in wealth, status—even dialect—that now divide countryside and city, the more urbanized east and the mostly rural west may be narrowed, advancing Beijing’s vision of a more “harmonious society.”

Bullet trains are already expanding the definition of a day trip and could help transform isolated backwaters like the inland city of Xian into booming heartland hubs. With traffic already clogging China’s expanding network of highways, bullet trains could ease the snarls while opening up travel to the millions of Chinese still unable to afford a car, or a plane ticket. In general, high-speed rail is likely to be just as fast as air travel, at half the price. By shrinking people’s sense of the scale of the nation, fast trains may also help stimulate the creativity and new thinking that China needs for the next stage of its economic development. Xie Weida, a professor at the Institute of Railways and Urban Mass Transport at Shanghai’s Tongji University, argues that “transport will have a big impact on every aspect of the entire life of our society,” stimulating development “not just in the field of economics, but in politics and culture too.”