Bullet trains traveling 300 kilometers an hour, or 186 miles an hour, began regular service between Beijing and Guangzhou, the main metropolis in southeastern China. Older trains still in service on a parallel rail line take 21 hours; Amtrak trains from New York to Miami, a shorter distance, still take nearly 30 hours.
Completion of the Beijing-Guangzhou route is the latest sign that China has resumed rapid construction of one of the world’s largest and most ambitious infrastructure projects, a network of four north-south routes and four east-west routes that span the country.
Lavish spending on the project has helped jump-start the Chinese economy twice: in 2009 during the global financial crisis and again this autumn, after a brief but sharp economic slowdown over the summer.
The hiring of as many as 100,000 workers per line has kept a lid on unemployment even as private sector construction has slowed down because of limits on real estate speculation. And the national network has helped reduce toxic air pollution in Chinese cities and curb demand for imported diesel, by freeing up a lot of capacity on older rail lines for freight trains to carry goods instead of heavily polluting trucks.
But the high-speed rail system has also been controversial in China. Debt to finance the construction has reached nearly 4 trillion renminbi, or $640 billion, making it one of the most visible reasons why total debt has been surging as a share of economic output in China, and approaching levels in the West.
The high-speed trains are also considerably expensive than the heavily subsidized older passenger trains. A second-class seat on the new bullet trains from Beijing to Guangzhou costs 865 renminbi, or $138, compared with 426 renminbi, or $69, for the cheapest bunk on one of the older trains, which also have narrow, uncomfortable seats for as little as 251 renminbi.
Worries about the high-speed network peaked in July 2011, when one high-speed train system plowed into the back of another near Wenzhou in southeastern China, killing 40 people.
A subsequent investigation blamed the crash on flawed signaling equipment. China had been operating high-speed trains at 350 kilometers an hour, or 217 miles an hour, and cut the top speed to the current rate in response to that crash.
The incident crystallized worries about the haste with which China has built its high-speed rail system. The first line, from Beijing to Tianjin, opened a week before the 2008 Olympics; a little over four years later, the country now has 9,349 kilometers, or 5,809 miles, of high-speed lines.
China’s aviation system has a good international reputation for safety, and its occasional deadly crashes have not attracted nearly as much attention. Transportation safety experts attribute the public’s fascination with the Wenzhou crash partly to the novelty of the system and partly to a distrust among many Chinese of what is perceived as a homegrown technology, in contrast with the Boeings and Airbus jets flown by Chinese airlines.
Japanese rail executives have complained, however, that the Chinese technology is mostly copied from them, an accusation that Chinese rail executives have strenuously denied.
The main alternative to trains for most Chinese lies in the country’s roads, which have a grim reputation by international standards. Periodic crashes of intercity buses kill dozens of people at a time, while crashes of private cars are frequent in a country where four-fifths of new cars are sold to first-time buyers, often with scant driving experience.
By KEITH BRADSHER
World's Longest High-Speed Rail Line Opens in China - NYTimes.com
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