China Advances High-Speed Rail Amid Safety, Corruption Concerns
China Advances High-Speed Rail Amid Safety, Corruption Concerns
Ye Shaoguang sits in his mud-and-brick home, waiting for the next explosion. It’s June, and his living room is filled with the bounty of rural Hunan: freshly plucked bayberries and ceramic jars of fresh honey from his bee colony. He ladles dark yellow syrup into a bowl. “Eat it,” he says. “It’s wild honey, like nothing you’ll get in the cities.” (Related pictures: “Chinese High-Speed Rail in Focus.”)
Beyond Ye’s front yard is a rice field, and beyond that, a gaping hole in the side of the valley: a tunnel being blasted through the mountains. When completed next year, the Zhangjiashi tunnel will allow trains to race 200 miles (320 kilometers) an hour between the southern metropolis of Kunming and the financial hub of Shanghai.
The project symbolizes China’s 21st-century aspirations: High-speed trains are a national priority for China, with 10,000 miles (160,000 kilometers) of lines due to link 24 cities by 2020. Since the program got under way in 2007, half of the lines have been built, with another major north-south artery the length of the country set to open later this year. It’s an engineering blitzkrieg meant to awe the Chinese people and show off the nation’s new industrial might.
Less impressive have been the costs—financial and human. Last year two events happened that continue to shake the railway system and China as a whole. One was the detention of China’s once powerful railway minister, Liu Zhijun, an old-style communist central planner who rolled out the high-speed network like a general using human-wave tactics.
Thousands of work teams were deployed to blast open mountains, bridge gullies, and pave over the countryside. But investigations show that Liu’s methods were based on massive corruption, and he himself is accused of graft and “sexual misconduct.”
The other event that has caused a broader rethink of China’s development path was a terrifying crash of two high-speed trains last year near the city of Wenzhou. The crash has come to symbolize the ruling Communist Party’s development-at-all-costs strategy. One commentator said on national television that China was “leaving the souls of the people behind.” As one crash survivor told me: “Where is happiness? Is it only in statistics and numbers?”