The United States and China are latecomers to high-speed rail, with large-scale networks of bullet trains only recently viewed as practical investments. Such lines are slow in coming here in the states, where the 150-mph Amtrak Acela Express is the closest thing we have to high-speed rail. But China is pouring a few hundred billion into high-speed rail and already has some bullet trains, including an impressive maglev system in Shanghai
As Duncan Hewitt points out in an excellent Newsweek article, China is spending $730 billion on railway construction. Some $300 billion of that will finance more than 8,000 miles of high-speed rail, a campaign that will strengthen China economically and politically by making easier to traverse the vast country. Hewitt says that could open the country to development, exploration and do for China what the Transcontinental Railroad and Interstate Highway System did for the United States.
In other words, China will become bigger even as it grows smaller.
In the United States, high-speed rail has until recently been considered an unnecessary luxury. That's started to change, with the Obama Administration setting aside $8 billion in stimulus funds for such projects. The presidents proposed 2010 budget will contain another $5 billion. More than $100 billion in proposals has been submitted, so clearly the country wants high-speed rail
But not as badly as China wants it.
To put things in perspective, Amtrak carried more than 27 million people last year, whereas China's railway system carried 1.4 billion. Trains are the primary mode of intercity transit in China, where they have been a crucial conduit for the massive migration from rural areas to urban. But the system is old and, worse yet, slow. A ride from Shanghai to Beijing can take 10 hours, Hewitt notes, while a trip from Beijing to the southern city of Guangzhou -- a center of manufacturing and commerce -- can take 20.
China plans to build 13,000 kilometers -- more than 8,000 miles -- of new high-speed rail lines by 2020, for a total investment of $300 billion. By any measure, by the time it is done China will have one of the most advanced high-speed rail networks in the world.
It's difficult to imagine the advantages brought by the new rail will not change China drastically. Interstate highways are woven into the cultural, social and economic fabric of the United States; China almost certainly will be similarly transformed by the mobility of high-speed rail. The question is whether the United States will maintain a competitive business edge after China makes intercity travel faster, cheaper and more convenient.
China's economic, military and social power has gone nowhere but up in the past few years. One of the things holding the country back was the ability to transport goods and people quickly, reliably and relatively cheaply. But with its huge investment in rail in general, and a devotion to high-speed rail in particular, opening up broader swaths of the country to investment, that barrier may at last be cleared
Photo of the Beijing South Railway Station: Flickr / docsdl
