The Year of the Metal Rabbit: China’s High-Speed Rail Network

In Business Week, David C. Michael of the Boston Consulting Group’s Beijing office, writes about China’s accomplishments in high speed rail construction:

The upcoming year will be a truly historic one for China because its fleet of “metal rabbits”—its bullet trains—and their network of tracks will begin to race across the full expanse of the nation, pulling China forward into the next phase of its blindingly fast progression.

It is staggering to think that China already has more than 5,000 kilometers (3,106 miles) of high-speed rail in operation. The trouble is that these rail lines are in various segments, and to date they have not linked together the country’s most well-known cities. In 2011, however, this will change dramatically. In the months ahead, China will progressively unveil many of the key links to form a true bullet-train network stretching across the nation.

The 105-kilometer Guangzhou-Shenzhen line will open in May, followed by the 1,318-kilometer Shanghai-Beijing line in June. By December, the opening of the 1,107-kilometer Beijing-Wuhan line will complete the north-south route between the Hong Kong border and Beijing (and which, by January 2012, will continue another 684 kilometers north to Shenyang). Also by December, the final links of the epic east-west route between Shanghai and Chengdu will also be operational—a 2,078-kilometer route that punches through mountain ranges and river valleys as it stitches China’s commercial capital to the ancient city of poets.

While other countries debate high-speed rail, it is already a reality in China. Over the next four years, Japanese bank Nomura projects the Chinese government will spend $113 billion per year on railway infrastructure and rolling stock. The new high-speed line connecting Shanghai to Hangzhou, opened in late October 2010, cost $4 billion and took just two years to build—an astonishingly rapid rate, given the glacial pace at which grand infrastructure projects proceed in most nations.

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