Timothy O'Rourke for The New York Times
The high-speed rail station in Changsha, China, opened less than four years ago.
By KEITH BRADSHER
Statistics suggest that China's high-speed trains have actually proved
to be one of the world's safest transportation systems so far.
The ticket lines at the Changsha station. China’s high-speed rail system has outpaced air travel.
Not anymore. Practically every train is sold out, although they leave
for cities all over the country every several minutes. Long lines snake
back from ticket windows under the 50-foot ceiling of white, gently
undulating steel that floats cloudlike over the departure hall. An
ambitious construction program will soon nearly double the size of the
16-platform station.
Just five years after China’s high-speed rail system opened, it is
carrying nearly twice as many passengers each month as the country’s
domestic airline industry. With traffic growing 28 percent a year for
the last several years, China’s high-speed rail network will handle more
passengers by early next year than the 54 million people a month who
board domestic flights in the United States.
Li Xiaohung, a shoe factory worker, rides the 430-mile route from
Guangzhou home to Changsha once a month to visit her daughter. Ms. Li
used to see her daughter just once a year because the trip took a full
day. Now she comes back in 2 hours 19 minutes.
Business executives like Zhen Qinan, a founder of the stock market in
coastal Shenzhen, ride bullet trains to meetings all over China to avoid
airport delays. The trains hurtle along at 186 miles an hour and are
smooth, well-lighted, comfortable and almost invariably punctual, if not
early. “I did not think it would change so quickly. High-speed trains
seemed like a strange thing, but now it’s just part of our lives,” Mr.
Zhen said.
China’s high-speed rail system has emerged as an unexpected success
story. Economists and transportation experts cite it as one reason for
China’s continued economic growth when other emerging economies are
faltering. But it has not been without costs — high debt, many people
relocated and a deadly
accident. The corruption trials this summer of two former senior rail
ministry officials have cast an unfavorable light on the bidding process
for the rail lines.
The high-speed rail lines have, without a doubt, transformed China, often in unexpected ways.
For example, Chinese workers are now more productive. A paper for the
World Bank by three consultants this year found that Chinese cities
connected to the high-speed rail network, as more than 100 are already,
are likely to experience broad growth in worker productivity. The
productivity gains occur when companies find themselves within a couple
of hours’ train ride of tens of millions of potential customers,
employees and rivals.
“What we see very clearly is a change in the way a lot of companies are
doing business,” said Gerald Ollivier, a World Bank senior transport
specialist in Beijing.
Productivity gains to the economy appear to be of the same order as the
combined economic gains from the usual arguments given for high-speed
trains, including time savings for travelers, reduced noise, less air
pollution and fuel savings, the World Bank consultants calculated.
Companies are opening research and development centers in more glamorous
cities like Beijing and Shenzhen with abundant supplies of young,
highly educated workers, and having them take frequent day trips to
factories in cities with lower wages and land costs, like Tianjin and
Changsha. Businesses are also customizing their products more through
frequent meetings with clients in other cities, part of a broader move
up the ladder toward higher value-added products.
Li Qingfu, the sales manager at the Changsha Don Lea Ramie Textile
Technology Company, an exporter of women’s dresses and blouses, said he
used to travel twice a year to Guangzhou, the commercial hub of
southeastern China. The journey, similar in distance to traveling from
Boston to Washington, required nearly a full day in each direction of
winding up and down mountains by train or by car.
He now goes almost every month on the punctual bullet trains, which
slice straight through the forested mountains and narrow valleys of
southern Hunan province and northern Guangdong province in a little over
two hours, traversing long tunnels and elevated concrete viaducts in
rapid succession.
“More frequent access to my client base has allowed me to more quickly
pick up on fashion changes in color and style. My orders have increased
by 50 percent,” he said.
China relocated large numbers of families whose homes lay in the path of
the tracks and quickly built new residential and commercial districts
around high-speed train stations.
The new districts, typically located in inner suburbs, not downtown
areas, have rapidly attracted large numbers of residents, partly because
of China’s rapid urbanization. Enough farm families become city
dwellers each year to fill New York City, part of a trend visible during
a series of visits to the Changsha high-speed train station over the
last four years.
When the station opened at the end of 2009 in an inner suburb full of
faded state-owned factories, the neighborhood was initially silent. But
by 2011, nearly 200 tower cranes could be counted building high-rises
during the half-hour drive from downtown Changsha to the high-speed rail
station. On a morning last month, only several dozen tower cranes were
visible along nearly the same route. But a vibrant new area of apartment
towers, commercial office buildings and hotels had opened near the
train station.
China’s success may not be easily reproduced in the West, and not just
because few places can match China’s pace of urbanization. China has
four times the population of the United States, and the great bulk of
its people live in the eastern third of the country, an area similar in
size to the United States east of the Mississippi.
“Except for Boston to Washington, D.C., we don’t have the corridors” of
high population density that China has, said C. William Ibbs, a
professor of civil engineering at the University of California,
Berkeley.
China’s high-speed rail program has been married to the world’s most
ambitious subway construction program, as more than half the world’s
large tunneling machines chisel away underneath big Chinese cities.
That has meant easy access to high-speed rail stations for huge numbers
of people — although the subway line to Changsha’s high-speed train
station has been delayed after a deadly tunnel accident, a possible side
effect of China’s haste.
New subway lines, rail lines and urban districts are part of China’s
heavy dependence on investment-led growth. Despite repeated calls by
Chinese leaders for a shift to more consumer-led growth, it shows little
sign of changing. China’s new prime minister, Li Keqiang, publicly
endorsed further expansion of the 5,900-mile high-speed rail network
this summer. He said the country would invest $100 billion a year in its
train system for years to come, mainly on high-speed rail.
The Chinese government is already struggling with nearly $500 billion in
overall rail debt. Most of it was incurred for the high-speed rail
system and financed with bank loans that must be rolled over as often as
once a year. Using short-term loans made the financing look less risky
on the balance sheets of the state-controlled banking system and held
down borrowing costs. But the reliance on short-term credit has left the
system vulnerable to any increase in interest rates.
“Even well-performing railways capable of covering their cash running
costs and interest on their debt will almost certainly be unable to
repay the principal without some long-term financing arrangements,” said
a World Bank report last year.
Another impact: air travel. Train ridership has soared partly because
China has set fares on high-speed rail lines at a little less than half
of comparable airfares and then refrained from raising them. On routes
that are four or five years old, prices have stayed the same as
blue-collar wages have more than doubled. That has resulted in many
workers, as well as business executives, switching to high-speed trains.
Airlines have largely halted service on routes of less than 300 miles
when high-speed rail links open. They have reduced service on routes of
300 to 470 miles.
The double-digit annual wage increases give the Chinese enough
disposable income that domestic airline traffic has still been growing
10 percent a year. That is the second-fastest growth among the world’s
10 largest domestic aviation markets, after India, which now faces a
slowdown as the fall of the rupee has made aviation fuel exorbitantly
expensive for air carriers there.
High-speed trains are not only allowing business managers from deep
inside China to reach bigger markets. They are also prompting foreign
executives to look deeper in China for suppliers as wages surge along
the coast.
“We always used to have go down south to Guangzhou to meet with European
clients, but now they come up to Changsha more often,” said Hwang Yin, a
sales executive at the Changsha Qilu Import and Export Company.
The only drawback: “The high-speed trains are getting very crowded these days.”
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