Quotes of the Day

When I first rode the rail line between the eastern Chinese cities of Suzhou and Shanghai in 1996, it felt as if the passengers were fleeing a disaster. Hundreds jammed through the station doors in Suzhou and sprinted for the train. With bags held high or balanced on bamboo poles, they choked the entrances to the cars, jostling for a prime spot on board. Those like me who didn't have the gumption to do the same were left to stand or sit on the floor. I found some room between cars, put my bag down and perched on top of it. The metal floor had rusted through in spots, and I could see the tracks below. For much of the two-hour, 100-km ride, I could smell the tracks too. The train's toilets emptied directly onto them.

Today, rolling suitcases have replaced bamboo poles as the primary means of hauling loads, and the walk across Suzhou station's platforms is a leisurely stroll. My seat is assigned, so there's no need to battle for position. I find my spot and slip into the comfortable reclining chair. The next passenger listens to music on his new Nokia phone as the train accelerates. It feels as though we've hardly left the station when an announcement tells us to prepare for the next stop, Shanghai. When the digital speedometer in the car hits 231 km/h, the Japanese businessmen sitting across from me look up from their laptops and nod in approval. The trip takes 42 minutes and, thankfully, I don't smell a thing.

In early July, an even faster line went into service linking Shanghai to Suzhou and Nanjing with trains that can run up to 350 km/h. That sort of relentless upgrading is typical of Chinese rail these days. Of all the infrastructural improvements this striving nation has made in the past three decades, perhaps the most impressive are those to the railway system. In 1981 China had 54,000 km of track; by the end of this year it will have nearly doubled that to 100,000 km. More importantly, China has gone from having one of the world's largest rail networks to also having one of the best. It covers some of the world's most difficult terrain — like the Tibetan Plateau, where workers laid track over a 5,000-m pass and 550 km of permafrost to link the Tibetan capital of Lhasa with the rest of China. The system has also seen a steady increase in average speed, from 48 km/h in 1993 to 70 km/h in 2007. On some routes, averages are phenomenal. The journey from the city of Wuhan in central China to Guangzhou in the south is now covered at 313 km/h. It's the fastest average speed in the world for a passenger train and cuts the trip time from 10 and a half hours to three hours.

Chinese authorities aren't satisfied, however. Spending on railroad construction increased 80% over 2008 totals to reach $88 billion in 2009. It will climb to $120 billion this year and exceed $700 billion over the next decade. The most ambitious focus of that investment is the expansion of China's high-speed passenger rail. Right now, China is the world's leader with 6,552 km of high-speed tracks (defined as those that can carry trains at speeds over 200 km/h). It plans to double that distance in two years.

At a time when infrastructure in the U.S. and Europe is aging fast, China's railways may give it a competitive edge over the world's leading economies. Rail would move travelers around the country in large numbers at unprecedented speeds. Smaller cities in the interior would grow in importance as ease of movement allows for longer journeys between them and jobs in larger centers. Fresh passenger lines would also free up older tracks for more freight transport, sending raw materials and finished goods across the country more easily. "Why is it like this?" asks Yang Zhongmin, the director general of the Ministry of Railways Development and Planning Department. "Because we went through 30 years when [rail] development fell behind the national rate of growth. So now we have to go faster." One of the aims is to help fulfill a long-term goal of developing China's western regions, which have not kept pace with the eastern provinces and their export-led boom. High-speed rail will enable growth in the interior "to be almost the same as what it is on the coast," argues Jia Limin, a professor of what the Chinese term railway science at Beijing Jiaotong University. "It will push western development much faster."

The network is already creating a new class of intercity commuters. "This train is really convenient," says Lu Ke, a 30-year-old civil servant, as he makes a twice-weekly, 205-km/h run between his job in Hangzhou and his home in Shanghai — a 90-minute journey that cruises past factories, fishponds and new apartment complexes and costs $4.25 each way. "In the past," he recalls, "people would be wedged into here like chopsticks, standing in every available space and even squeezing beneath the seats."

But critics worry that with more than half of China's population still rural, spending billions on fancy rail projects is excessive — particularly as it comes a mere decade after the country embarked on building an equally impressive highway system. For every white-collar commuter like Lu, there are dozens more migrant workers who need to make only two train trips a year — from their jobs on the coast to their inland hometowns to celebrate the Lunar New Year, then back again. Earning as little as $100 a month, they can hardly afford a seat in the high-speed network's plush carriages (the journey from Wuhan to Guangzhou, for instance, starts at $72).

Although construction costs are cheap in China, high-speed railways are also much more expensive to build and maintain than standard railroads. Fast-train networks have traditionally been built in smaller, developed nations like Japan, because they are best suited to travel between highly populated, closely located cities — not in a place like China, where large cities are spread out. What's more, many Chinese are perfectly willing to take slower, cheaper trains. In an opinion piece in the China Daily published in April, Zhao Jian, an economics professor and colleague of Jia's at Beijing Jiaotong University, wrote, "China's per capita income is still relatively low and so is the economic value of time. Cheap travel with basic comfort suits ordinary Chinese passengers, who do not want to spend three times as much for high-speed tickets just to save a few hours of travel time."

The danger is not just that China ends up with a much better rail system than it needs at this point. It's that it incurs heavy debts in building it. Massive infrastructural investments over the past year have helped China become the first major economy to pull out of the global economic crisis, but they could become a heavy burden if the recovery stumbles. The current flagships of the high-speed-rail project, the Beijing-Tianjin line in the north, Wuhan-Guangzhou in the south and Zhengzhou-Xi'an in central China, will all face difficulties breaking even, according to Zhao. When China's grandiose highway projects ran into trouble during the Asian economic crisis of the late 1990s, the government was able to finance them thanks to strong export growth over the next decade. Another export boom is less likely in the current global climate.

There is, however, the possibility that China could cushion the risk by exporting its rail expertise. State media report that Beijing wants to expand high-speed rail to more than a dozen Asian nations, eventually building a high-speed grid that would link China to Europe. Already, Chinese firms have begun to win key rail projects overseas. Last year, Saudi Arabia awarded the $1.8 billion first phase of a high-speed rail link between Mecca and Medina to a consortium that includes the state-owned China Railway Construction Corporation. Chinese companies are building high-speed-rail projects in Venezuela and Turkey, and the Ministry of Railways is even organizing a Chinese bid for California's proposed $45 billion project to build a high-speed-rail network linking the southern and northern parts of the state.

The American train system could certainly use a boost. It now has just one high-speed line in operation, Amtrak's Acela Express between Boston and Washington, D.C., which averages a measly 116 km/h. That laggardness isn't lost on ordinary Chinese. "Chinese trains have gotten so much better," says Xu Wenhong, a 55-year-old schoolteacher traveling on the train from Hangzhou to Beijing to see his newborn granddaughter. "Now even the U.S. is thinking of buying them." He smiles with satisfaction as we speed into the future at 200 km/h.

• Austin Ramzy
• China is hoping that massive investment in its railway system will speed up development of its interior, give it a competitive edge over other major economies and bring in even more export earnings