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Imagine a train that took you from Washington, DC to Dallas, Texas in nine hours… or Paris,
France to Athens, Greece in nine hours… or Adelaide, South Australia to Perth, Western
Australia in nine hours.
These train trips actually take 44 hours, 44 hours, and 41 hours respectively so the
idea of making any of these trips by train in nine hours seems almost absurd.
In China, though, that’s reality.
In September, 2018 the country opened up a brand new high speed rail route with d irect
trains from Hong Kong to Beijing.
This is about the same distance as DC to Dallas, Paris to Athens, or Adelaide to Perth and
yet these trains make the trip in only 8 hours and 56 minutes.
What makes this even more impressive is that ten years ago, in 2008, at the time of the
Beijing Olympics, China’s high-speed rail network consisted of this.
We’ll have to zoom in because the extent of the network was one 19 mile-long Maglev
train from Shanghai Airport to the outskirts of Shanghai and a traditional high-speed rail
line from Beijing to the coastal city of Tianjin.
Today, ten years later, that network has expanded into this.
China has eight times as much high speed track as France, ten times as much as Japan, twenty
times as much as the UK, and five-hundred times as much as the US.
In fact, China has as much high-speed rail track as the rest of the world combined.
It is staggering the amount of progress they have made in such a short amount of time.
Traditionally high speed rail exists in small countries with rich populations by the likes
of Germany, France, and Japan.
China is neither of these things.
The country is enormous, about the same size as the US, and is also not rich.
While no longer poor, China is definitively a middle income country.
It’s about as rich as Mexico, Thailand, or Brazil.
In fact, despite being the country with the most high speed rail in the world, China is
also the poorest country in the world to have any high speed rail.
Despite the country’s vast size, China’s huge population makes it very dense especially
in the east half.
This means that China does have large cities close enough together where it makes sense
to take the train rather than the plane.
Trips like Guangzhou to Changsha, a distance of 350 miles, take an hour by plane or 2 hours
and 20 minutes by train.
When factoring in the time it takes to check in, go through security, and board it absolutely
makes sense to go by train when traveling between these two cities even without considering
that the high-speed train is cheaper than flying.
High speed rail even makes sense in China on longer routes where it wouldn’t in other
countries.
Beijing and Shanghai, for example, are about 650 miles apart.
Normally that would be too far for high speed rail to make sense.
Paris and Barcelona, for example, are 500 miles apart—closer than Beijing and Shanghai—but
only two high speed trains a day run between the two cities compared to about 20 flights.
Between Beijing and Shanghai, on the other hand, about 50 flights run per day run compared
to 41 trains.
Considering the trains carry far more people each, up to 1,200, trains are therefore the
dominant means of transport between these two cities.
There are a few differences between these two routes.
For one, while Beijing-Shanghai by train takes 4 hours and 28 minutes, Paris-Barcelona, despite
being a shorter distance, takes a longer 6 hours and 25 minutes.
The other factor, though, is about the competition.
Europe has an efficient air transport network dominated by budget airlines that are often
far cheaper than trains.
You can find tickets for flights between Paris and Barcelona for as little as $12 while the
cheapest Beijing-Shanghai flights go for $74.
Air travel within China is also far from efficient.
China Southern, China Eastern, and Air China, the three largest Chinese airlines, arrive
on time an average of 67%, 66%, and 63% of the time respectively.
A big reason for this is that there’s just not enough room in the skies.
A majority of China’s airspace is military controlled meaning that there are just these
narrow flight corridors that account for 30% of airspace where civilian planes can fly.
With tons of planes and not much room to fly planes are frequently delayed by air traffic
control to wait for the airspace to clear up which leads to the abysmal on-time ratings
of the country’s airlines.
While the Beijing-Shanghai flight takes only two hours the potential of delays, along with
all the other factors that make air travel slower, help make the train the popular means
of transport on this longer route.
Other train routes in China, though, make less sense.
For example, in 2014, the new high speed train line opened between Lanzhou and Urumqi.
These two cities are relatively small by China standards.
They both have a population of 3.5 million and between them are only small towns.
They’re also not close—about 1,000 miles separate them.
This project could therefore be compared to building a high speed train from Denver to
Seattle—they’re modestly sized cities a long way’s apart with nothing big in between.
Some people would use it but it wouldn’t make any financial sense.
In China, Lanzhou and Urumqi are not small cities but there’s really nothing big in
between and, at that distance, there’s no sense not flying.
The Lanzhou-Urumqi high speed train takes 11 hours compared to the 2.5 hour flight and
the construction cost of that line was $20 billion meaning that, if every seat on every
train was filled tickets would still have to cost $400 each way just to make back the
construction cost in 30 years.
In reality tickets cost about $80 and trains are far from full meaning that this rail line
is just insanely far from profitable.
The ticket revenues from these trains reportedly don’t even cover the cost of electricity
for the line let alone construction and other operating costs.
So why would the Chinese government sink so much money into something that has no prospects
of really ever making money?
Well, politics.
Urumqi is the capital of the Xinjiang province.
While 92% of China’s population is Han Chinese, the Xinjiang province is primarily Uyghur—one
of the minority ethnic groups of China—and there has been an ongoing fairly strong separatist
movement by the Uyghurs from China that has often turned violent.
The central government in Beijing, however, wants the Xinjiang province to be just as
integrated as the rest of the country and has tried a variety of methods to force this
including moving Han Chinese into the region and the imprisonment of Uyghurs in so-called
“reeducation camps.”
The high-speed train is just the most recent tactic to bring Xinjiang closer to Beijing
and this is no secret.
The central government is fully upfront in saying that the line was built to promote,
as they call it, “ethnic unity.”
This isn’t even the first time they’ve used this tactic of railroad politics.
Tibet, a region even better known than Xinjiang for its independence movement, was the last
region in China not to have a railway due to its small population and intense terrain.
The central government still wanted to build one, though, to bring it closer to the rest
of the country and so they did.
Trains now run directly from Beijing to Lhasa, Tibet in 47 hours on the highest elevation
rail line in the world.
These trains reach an elevation of 16,640 feet—so high that passengers have to use
a direct oxygen supply.
Even the train to Hong Kong serves the central government’s goal of further integrating
Hong Kong, which is an autonomous special administrative region, into mainland China.
While high-speed trains to Hong Kong certainly do make a lot more sense than trains to the
Xinjiang province, many Hong Kongers have not greeted the new service kindly as they
view it as an encroachment on the autonomy guaranteed to them by Hong Kong Basic Law.
The most controversial part has not been the fact that there’s a train but rather that
the station in Hong Kong includes an area that is effectively now part of Mainland China
since people pass through border controls before boarding the train in Hong Kong.
Just like any country, what having a high-speed, efficient rail network in China is doing is
bringing the country together and making it stronger even if it’s bringing together
people that want to stay apart.
No matter their motives, it’s clear that China is building their high speed rail network
more efficiently than any other country.
To compare, this is the plan for California’s high speed rail line from San Francisco to
the Los Angeles area.
It’s currently in very early phases of construction and is expected to open by 2029.
Of course that means that the time it will take for the California’s high speed rail
network to go from this to this is the same as the time it took China’s high speed rail
network to go from this to this but, the main thing to look at is cost.
This Californian network is expected to cost $77 billion and is 520 miles long meaning
that it will cost $148 million per mile to build.
China, on the other hand, is building their network at a cost of only $30 million per
mile.
Of course labor costs are lower in China and their network crosses more rural areas where
land acquisition costs are lower but, what’s more meaningful is that they’ve turned building
high speed rail into almost an assembly line process where they can mass produce even the
most expensive elements like viaducts and tunnels.
In true Chinese fashion, with scale they’re making high-speed cheaper.
The big difference between China and a lot of the western world, particularly countries
like the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK, is that high speed rail is at
the top of the government’s priorities.
Unsurprisingly given their government structure, in many ways, China has placed social benefit,
at least by the definition of the central government, ahead of profitability when developing
their high speed rail network.
High-speed rail lines just aren’t as profitable as other means of transport like planes but
they are undoubtably better for countries so you have to consider the social benefit
when looking at their overall profitability.
For the San Francisco to LA high speed rail route, for example, one study found that the
social benefit derived from lower carbon emissions, higher worker productivity, and reduced casualties
from fewer people on the road would be equivalent to about $440 million per year.
As it turns out, this is almost the exact amount that the state will have to subsidize
the line for it to break even.
The China Railway Corporation, a state owned enterprise, is actually slightly profitable,
although it does have huge amounts of debts and is helped by government subsidies.
The benefit to the Chinese people, though, is huge.
The high-speed rail allows those who can’t afford to live in the most expensive cities
like Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou to easily commute from cheaper suburbs by high-speed
rail.
Thanks to the high-speed rail, there are now 75 million people who can commute to Shanghai
in under an hour.
It is growing what are already some of the largest cities and, when it comes to cities,
size is strength.
These lines connecting the east’s largest cities are some of the most profitable rail
lines in the world and they’re making living and working in China easier but the question
is, when we look back decades from now, whether the high-speed trains to smaller cities will
have made sense.
Out of a desire to keep the lines going straight between the big cities, the stops for smaller
cities are often out in the countryside dozens of miles away from the city core.
The high speed station for Hengyang, for example, a smaller city of only a million, is about
a 45 minute drive east of the city center.
The hope is that new development will spring up around the stations but this network structure,
even if it saves time on the train, wastes time before and after which degrades the benefit
of high-speed rail.
In all, China is really the first country to have experimented with long-distance, high
speed rail through less-dense areas in its west.
In the east, though, these trains are enlarging the country’s economic power.
It’s just one of the many factors speeding up China’s catch-up with world’s richest
countries.
Even though China is building these trains for less and innovating on the construction
of high-speed rail, the real reason why China is so good at building railways is because
they have the one thing that almost every other country lacks—the political will for
high-speed trains.
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