http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/8600749/China-to-open-Beijing-Shanghai-high-speed-rail-link.html
Our journey into the future starts even before boarding the sleek, white Chinese bullet-train that will speed the 820 miles to Shanghai — that’s almost as far as Land’s End to John O’Groats — in just four hours and 48 minutes.
Beijing’s South Railway Station is a marvel of modernity, a vaulting glass dome propped up on steel stilts that looks like a flying saucer has just landed from outer space. Compared to the average British railway station, that’s where we might as well be.
China has more than built 300 ultra-modern railway stations during a decade-long railway building boom; grand symbols of its rising economic power, just as the great London stations of Euston, Paddington and Kings Cross were for the Victorians.
It’s 9am and, with soft whine of the giant electric motor, we’re off; gliding out of Beijing South where the platform is so clean the guard’s reflection shines in the polished granite. A digital sign in the carriage shows our steadily building speed in kilometers per hour… 48kph… 180kph… 247kph….
Seven minutes after departure and we reach cruising speed of 300kph (186mph)
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But whatever the cost, it seems, China’s leaders are determined to forge ahead — “do it now, do it fast, do it now, do it fast” — is the mantra, to build before land gets too expensive and people too difficult to move.
Sustainable or not, the race to build a new, world-beating China is on.
That is why in the last decade China has laid more new high-speed rail track than all new Western countries combined over the past half-century, and it plans to keep investing at the rare of GBP70bn a year for the forseeable future.
Could China build Britain’s own HS2 links to from London to Leeds, Manchester and perhaps beyond?
“Of course it can!”, says Xu Yifa, a lifelong servant of China Railways, “There can be no argument. China has been to all the countries with high speed rail and then taken the best parts. We are now the most advanced high speed rail nation in the world. We can build it for you easily.” Mr Xu began his career nearly 40 years ago shoveling coal into steam locos — he estimates he’s personally shoveled 8,000 tons of coal - before becoming a diesel-electric driver and now an official on the Beijing-Shanghai line.
China is full of such people, who have seen almost unfathomable changes in their own lifetimes, and believe earnestly in the future their nation is building for itself. They believe because they see it changing daily before their eyes.
Could China even fix our perennially late trains? “No problem, that’s not difficult,” he says, “just a question of good management.” No doubt it is more complicated than that, but sometimes it’s impossible not to admire, even envy, China’s sense of self-belief.
