BEIJING — They’re laying track to Tibet. In Shanghai, they’re about to christen the world’s most futuristic commercial train — a no-wheels wonder that races on a cushion of magnetism. Next, China’s railway builders want to link the country’s commercial capital to Beijing by bullet train, according to the Associated Press.
These exploits are just the high-profile face of a railway binge in China — an effort whose scale and ambition mirror the drive that pulled together the 19th-century United States with steel rails.
Railway officials plan to lay 8,500 miles of track nationwide by 2005. It won’t just boost trade, they say; it will develop areas left out of China’s 2-decade-old economic boom and tie Tibet and other restive minority areas to the ethnic Chinese mainstream.
“It will unite the ethnic groups,” Sun Yongfu, the deputy railway minister, said of the project to build Tibet’s first railway, which began last year.
Nationwide, plans call for laying 4,400 miles of track and adding lines in areas with heavy traffic to ease congestion. The projected cost to Beijing is $31 billion, plus billions more from local governments and possibly private investors.
The expansion is especially critical because rail moves 54 percent of China’s domestic trade and more than half of its passenger travel, according to Railway Minister Fu Zhihuan.
The plan aims to redress the growing gap between booming cities of China’s east, whose ports give them access to export markets, and the landlocked, isolated west. Officials see rail as a key to spreading prosperity by cutting the cost of exporting local goods and attracting investors.