Democratische & economische ontwikkeling per trein

[Cees Binkhorst]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

Democratische & economische ontwikkeling in China komt met de trein.

Wellicht een aansporing voor een snelle trein van Randstad naar het
Noorden?

Of blijven de belangen van de huizenbouwers in de Randstad (en degenen
die daar afhankelijk van zijn) voor altijd prevaleren?

Groet / Cees
The Shrinking of China
By Duncan Hewitt | NEWSWEEK

Published Oct 24, 2009

>>From the magazine issue dated Nov 2, 2009


For decades, rail travel in China meant an arduous overnighter in a
crowded East German–designed train, riding along a rickety old track.
Now China is undergoing a rail revolution. Over the next three years,
the government will pour some $300 billion into its railways, expanding
its network by 20,000 kilometers, including 13,000 kilometers of track
designed for high-speed trains capable of traveling up to 350kph.
Result: China, a nation long defined by the vastness of its geography,
is getting, much, much smaller.

Already, the journey from Beijing to Taiyuan, the capital of Shanxi
province, has been slashed from eight hours to three. Shortly before the
Olympics last year, the 120km trip from Beijing to Tianjin was cut from
almost an hour to just 27 minutes. In the next few years, a train
journey from Wuhan to Guangzhou, halfway across the country, will shrink
from 10 to three hours. The trip from Shanghai to Beijing, which
currently clocks in at 10 grueling hours—and twice that, not so long ago
—will be cut to just four, making train travel between China's two most
important cities a viable competitor to air for the first time.
Similarly, a trip from the capital to the southern manufacturing
powerhouse of Guangzhou—more or less the entire length of the nation—
will take just eight hours, compared with 20 before and more than a day
and a half by bus.


In many ways, China's rail revolution is comparable to the building and
opening of America's transcontinental railway in the 19th century or,
more recently, to the opening of the U.S. interstate highway system in
the 1950s and 1960s. In their own ways, each of those infrastructure
projects opened up the United States for development, exploration, and
trade. By making travel available to ever-larger numbers of people, they
changed not only distances, but individuals' perceptions of their own
limitations, shifting "people's mental maps of the land mass in which
they lived," says Colin Divall, a professor of railway history at
University of York in the U.K.

The advent of high-speed trains is likely to have even greater
implications for China, given its larger territory, population, and
history of regional unrest. By improving connections, they may help
spread economic development more evenly around the country, helping
Beijing to bind the nation together and strengthen its hold over the
provinces, and decreasing the likelihood that China's internal divisions
might one day lead it to fragmenting into "warring states," as some
worst-case forecasts have predicted. In particular, the leadership hopes
that its call for the nation's talents and industry to "go west" to
China's poorer provinces may become easier once western regions become
less remote, thanks to rail. Thus the gaps in wealth, status—even
dialect—that now divide countryside and city, the more urbanized east
and the mostly rural west may be narrowed, advancing Beijing's vision of
a more "harmonious society."

Bullet trains are already expanding the definition of a day trip and
could help transform isolated backwaters like the inland city of Xian
into booming heartland hubs. With traffic already clogging China's
expanding network of highways, bullet trains could ease the snarls while
opening up travel to the millions of Chinese still unable to afford a
car, or a plane ticket. In general, high-speed rail is likely to be just
as fast as air travel, at half the price. By shrinking people's sense of
the scale of the nation, fast trains may also help stimulate the
creativity and new thinking that China needs for the next stage of its
economic development. Xie Weida, a professor at the Institute of
Railways and Urban Mass Transport at Shanghai's Tongji University,
argues that "transport will have a big impact on every aspect of the
entire life of our society," stimulating development "not just in the
field of economics, but in politics and culture too."

Already, government investment has created something of an economic
miniboom. At the railway station in Suzhou—the old Yangtze delta city
north of Shanghai famous for its canals and ornamental gardens—teams of
construction workers now spend their days suspended precariously from a
latticework of girders high above the track. Soon, a brand-new
glass-and-steel terminal will rise here, and the crumbling old 1950s
station, with its few platforms, will be consigned to history.
Guangzhou, Shanghai, and other cities are following suit, building shiny
new stations to service the fast new trains. Authorities are so
confident about the market that they've invested tens of millions of
dollars in localizing production of bullet trains, with 85 percent of
the parts for trains in the new Beijing-Shanghai line expected to be
manufactured domestically.

Far bigger economic effects are down the line. The train tracks are
helping to spur consumer spending, with Beijing residents traveling as
far as 120 kilometers to shop in places like Tianjin, where prices are
lower. The $8.50 one-way trip takes less than 30 minutes, attracting
many middle-class passengers who see the bus—which takes three times as
long—as a nonstarter. Beijing's campaign to promote development across
regions—like the Yangtse River Delta around Shanghai, or the Pearl River
Delta from Guangzhou to Hong Kong—gets a huge boost from the fact that
it will soon be possible to traverse these regions in minutes.
High-speed rail will cut the trip from Shanghai to Nanjing from what was
originally four hours to just 75 minutes. The city of Wenzhou in
southeastern Zhejiang—home to many of China's biggest private
enterprises, including fashion brands like Meters Bonwe and shoemakers
like Aokang—has long been hindered by its relative isolation in a
mountainous coastal area. This month it opened high-speed rail tracks
connecting it for the first time to Ningbo, a major port, and to the
neighboring province of Fujian, an important hub for Taiwanese
investment. The link, which will ultimately extend south to Hong Kong,
is expected to further stimulate Wenzhou's legendary entrepreneurial
spirit, which has seen it move rapidly from small family workshops to
major textile and electronics manufacturing, as well as becoming the
source of much of the real-estate investment around China.

The high-speed lines will also help eliminate trade bottlenecks by
freeing up space on existing tracks. Paul French, head of the Shanghai
retail and logistics consultancy Access Asia, says many foreign
businesses are frustrated by the lack of space for transporting goods on
China's railways, with freight trains monopolized by shipments of coal
and grain. "There's too much investment in passenger rail now and not
enough in cargo," he says, noting that this forces companies to add to
the number of "overloaded trucks plowing along China's death
expressways." But the investment in passenger tracks will allow the old
lines to be used for cargo, aiding the Chinese economy by allowing for a
more efficient freight-train network. Xie says the government also plans
to bolster freight rail with a $40 billion investment on new rolling
stock by the end of 2010.

That could put Beijing's policy of opening up the west in high gear.
Introduced in 2000 with the aim of binding some of China's poorer
western regions to the economic growth of the east coast, thus reducing
dangerous social and economic imbalances, the initiative has been
hampered by slow and expensive transport connections and the
unwillingness of qualified talent to work in remote western regions. The
fast-train links may help reduce all of these problems. The ancient
capital of Xian has struggled to attract cutting-edge industries to its
isolated location, 1,200 kilometers and 10 hours by train from Beijing,
but soon that ride will fall to just four hours.

China's effort to develop medium-size cities across the country, in
order to reduce the pressure of massive internal migration on big
coastal cities, will also get a boost. The fast-rail links include
rapidly expanding light-rail connections around major cities,
encouraging moves from central cities to smaller satellite towns, or
even commutes from one city to another. Retired people seeking a better
environment are beginning to do the same.

Still, there is also the possibility that the unifying aim of the
high-speed-rail project could create unexpected challenges for Beijing.
Some of the fast-train routes are so popular that many passengers can be
forced to stand throughout their journey. Outrage over this has led some
media outlets to demand that the state-controlled railway system be
opened to competition. "Only when monopoly is replaced by free
competition," said an article in the Chengdu Business Daily, "can we
expect real quality train services." What's more, improvements in
mobility could begin to undermine the Chinese government's highly
restrictive residency regulations, which even today tie people's right
to welfare, health care, and education to the place where they were born
or have worked during their adult life. Now, according to Mingzheng Shi,
head of New York University's teaching center in Shanghai and a
specialist in China's urban development, more and more people are moving
across old administrative boundaries. "Their concepts of cities and
distance are changing," he says. "People from Shanghai see no problem
now in living in cities in southern Jiangsu province, where apartments
are cheaper, and then taking the fast train to Shanghai in 20 to 40
minutes." Large numbers of urban residents moving away from the cities
where their welfare entitlements have traditionally been located may
prove too much for the household registration system, and could lead to
its "eventual complete collapse," says Shi, removing a vital plank of
the state's traditional mechanism of social control.

Over the longer term, easier travel could be the driving force behind a
new understanding of what China can one day become. Chinese officials
have long argued that the nation's vast area and population make it too
unwieldy to be suited to multiparty democracy—and this idea has been
deeply lodged in the Chinese psyche for generations. This may have been
unsurprising in a country where a couple of decades ago it would often
take half a day to get to the next town, and where it could easily take
four hours to make a phone call from one city to another. Yet once
people begin to sense that their country is getting smaller, those
obstacles are likely to seem smaller, too. In fact, the effect of the
high-speed trains could be that they do bring China together—just not in
the way Beijing might have planned.

Find this article at http://www.newsweek.com/id/219416

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