(Agence France Presse distributed the following article on August 4.)
BEIJING — Chinese top planners are to decide soon if Japan or Germany will be awarded the lucrative contract for providing the technology for a new railway between Beijing and Shanghai.
The State Development and Reform Commission will pick either Japan’s bullet train (Shinkansen) or Germany’s magnetic levitation (Maglev) technology the high-speed rail line at its next meeting, the China Business Post reported.
The newspaper did not specify when the commission’s upcoming meeting would be held.
The report came amid renewed doubt about who exactly is the frontrunner among the foreign competitors for the 12-billion-dollar project to equip the 1,300-kilometer (810-mile) rail line.
“We haven’t decided which country’s technology will be used,” an official at the commission’s railway department told AFP. “We’re preparing discussions on that.”
The China Business Post also quoted a source as saying reports of a Shinkansen proposal being confirmed for the Beijing-Shanghai railway were groundless.
The newspaper said the commmission recently sent technical teams to inspect railways in China’s provinces to get references for the technology decision for the Beijing-Shanghai rail line.
The Economic Observer, a state-run Chinese weekly, reported in July that China was “more than 90 percent certain” to adopt Japan’s bullet-train technology to build the railway.
The report followed a German recognition that prospects looked dim for the space-age technology developed by Transrapid International, a consortium comprising German industrial engineers ThyssenKrupp AG and Siemens AG (news – web sites).
A senior member of the Siemens’ management team said that it had received “clear signals that the decision will be taken in favor of the traditional train technology”.
Hopes had been high after Shanghai installed the 430-kilometer-per-hour (260-mile-per-hour) Maglev for commercial use on a line between the city’s Pudong airport and downtown.