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True high speed rail may be a a pipe dream here in the UK, but for the People’s Republic of China, it’s a cornerstone of the country’s transportation infrastructure. Yesterday, Chinese officials inaugurated the longest such rail line on Earth and announced plans for seven more.
While not nearly as fast as the Tokyo-Nagoya mag-lev line Japan is working on, the high speed line running from, Beijing, the capital city of the People’s Republic of China to Guangzhao, a provincial capital 1,428 miles (2,298 kilometres) to the South, is nearly five times as long. What’s more, the line’s trains reach speeds of 186 MPH (300 KPH) which shaves an astounding 12 hours off the trip. What was once a 20 hour-plus trek, now takes only eight. More than 150 pairs of trains will serve the line every day—darting from one capital city to the other with stops at other provincial capitals—Shijiazhuang, Wuhan and Changsha—along the way.
This is just one of eight new HSR lines China hopes to construct by 2020—four North-South and four East-West—to help ferry goods and people across the country’s vast territories without having to rely on airlines or freeways. Instead, the Ministry of Railways (MOR) has upgraded conventional lines to accommodate high speed trains, built designated passenger lines, and even dabbled in mag-lev technology. In all, China operates the longest HSR network in the world, maintaining more than 5,800 miles (9,300 km) of rail. The MOR is working to more than double that figure to 11,184 miles (18,000 km) by 2015, according to the Xinhua News Agency, as part of the country’s modernisation efforts.
[Washington Post - Inhabitat - Wikipedia Image: The AP]
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What? Our GDP growth isn’t going to meet expectations? Moar infrastructure spending!
This made me chuckle. Though to be fair, it’s been a project for rather a long time now….
True, but the problem is that in their rush to inflate their GDP figures, capital gets invested in projects that are impressive but pointless (like the Shanghai maglev).
Majority of their “inflated” GDP comes from the balance of trade credit, with inflation being the only thing that’s really artificial, given the level of sterilisation used on the banking system.
Depends what you mean by “the balance of trade credit”. If you mean China’s trade surplus, then it’s only a few percent of China’s GDP and has been shrinking for the past year.
The PRC needs its GDP growth figures to meet expectations and with the trade surplus shrinking needs to find a substitute somewhere. Domestic consumption is too difficult to stimulate so they’ve elected to try and increase investment through lending targets and cutting both interest and reserve rates. Megaprojects like the railway above are the result. My comment about “inflating” the growth figures was mostly based on my belief that the drive to boost investment (currently at about 50% of GDP) results in a misallocation of capital.
As for inflation, the latter isn’t as artificial as RMB exchange rates but has largely been hidden in the form of rising asset prices rather than in CPI figures. When it does the PBC is, in economic terms, fucked.
I wonder what a ticket costs?