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WORLD VIEW:China's transcontinental rail plan would be the biggest infrastructure project in history
FROM BEIJING to London by high-speed train in two days – through Burma, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Iran and Turkey. From London to Singapore in three days – via Vietnam and Malaysia. And from Shanghai to Berlin in three days – through Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Siberian Russia and Ukraine.
These romantic prospects are opened up by the news that China is planning to extend its intensive railway construction programme internationally to create a transport network linking it to southeast, south and central Asia – a new iron Silk Road.
The network would link up with Europe’s high-speed rail (HSR) system under development in France, Germany, Spain and Italy for the past four decades, building on Japan’s pioneering Shinkansen project of the 1960s. It would also be the greatest infrastructure project in world history, and China hopes to complete it in 10 years (for map and details see www.thetransportpolitic.com/2010/03/09).
It is an extraordinary story dramatically illustrating how states that enter the world market later than others can combine the highest levels of technology with comparatively uneven development. China is already involved in the second- largest public works programme in history, following in size only the US interstate highway system of the 1950s.
Under the stimulus plan adopted to counter the domestic effects of global recession, China plans to spend more than $1 trillion (€753 billion) on expanding its railway network from 78,000km to 110,000km by 2012 and to 120,000km by 2020.
The network will feature interoperable fast and high-speed tracks capable of taking freight and passenger trains.
The first HSR Harmony Express, linking the cities of Wuhan and Guangzhou two years ago, involved building 625 bridges and 221 tunnels. It covers 1,000km in three hours. The forthcoming Beijing-Shanghai line will cost more than the Three Gorges Dam project. The system is completely Chinese built, originally using German and Japanese technology.
China is already half way through the construction of the largest HSR network in the world with the fastest trains, capable of travelling at 320km/h. Its spending on such relatively clean technology outstrips that of the (similarly sized) US by four to one.
It is far ahead of US president Barack Obama’s programme, announced last year, to upgrade the US rail system, which faces serious funding and political problems. Chinese companies are currently bidding to construct a high-speed track in California.
Historical ironies abound. Chinese workers helped to construct the US rail system in the 1870s and 1880s along with Irish navvies. Will we see a new generation of Irish workers involved in these projects?
The burst of railway building in the mid-19th century was, according to Eric Hobsbawm in The Age of Capital, "the largest body of public works and almost the most dazzling feat of engineering known to human history up to that date".
He describes it as an “heroic age of the engineers . . . who thought in continents and oceans. For them the world was a single unit, bound together with rails of iron and steam engines, because the horizons of business were like their dreams worldwide”.
The Chinese, humiliated by western imperialism, are now turning the tables by exploiting the latecomer’s ability to leap over backwardness. As then, engineers are to the fore. They dominate the Chinese Communist Party leadership.
According to Wang Mengshu, a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and a senior consultant on China’s domestic high-speed railways, “we are aiming for the trains to run almost as fast as airplanes” between China and Europe.
The government is already in negotiations with 17 countries on the railway network, which would also allow China to transport raw materials more efficiently.
“It was not China that pushed the idea to start with,” said Wang.
“It was the other countries that came to us, especially India. These countries cannot fully implement the construction of a high-speed rail network and they hoped to draw on our experience and technology.”
While China uses government money and bank loans arising from its huge trade surpluses, it expects other states to use public and private funding as well as Chinese capital. It would also prefer to see payment made in natural resources.
The Burma connection is already under way, and will be paid for by supplies of lithium to make batteries. Oil is an obvious resource in Iran, and the same applies with Russia in Siberia.
Major technical problems concerning track sizes and interoperability face China in dealing with these 17 states. But the boundless engineering confidence arising from China’s rapid development can overcome these issues.
The transport network will consolidate economic relations with China’s Asian neighbours and help develop a more integrated regional economy in that part of the world, just as 19th-century globalisation was integrated by rail, steam and telegraph.
The density of urban populations in China and other Asian states makes high-speed trains a sensible investment. Does the same apply in central Asia and Russia?
China’s audacity may underestimate the potential problems, making the 10-year scenario for completing the links unrealistic. But don’t doubt that this is a long game.
pegillespie@gmail.com