Riding China's high-speed trains
China has more high-speed rail connections than the rest of the world combined. By 2020 the network was meant to grow to 30,000 kilometres.
China has more high-speed rail connections than the rest of the world combined. By 2020 the network was meant to grow to 30,000 kilometres. Our correspondent Stephan Scheuer shows what makes the trains special.
Background
When this report was filmed, China already had around 25,000 kilometres of high-speed rail – the largest network in the world. The first high-speed lines went into operation in 2007; the build-out then proceeded at a pace with few international parallels. For comparison: in Germany, the ICE network covers around 1,600 kilometres.
Today China's high-speed network spans over 45,000 kilometres – more than the high-speed networks of all other countries in the world combined. The early build-out was financed through significant state debt; the state railway China Railway today sits on a debt mountain of several hundred billion euros. Beijing nonetheless treats the network as strategic infrastructure, whose operating losses are outweighed by the wider economic benefit.
The scale shows up in the numbers: the trip from Beijing to Shanghai – almost 1,300 kilometres – takes only four and a half hours today on the Fuxing train (400 km/h maximum, 350 km/h regular). Domestic flights on this route have lost dramatic market share; rail dominates traffic between China's metropolitan regions.
The build-out has since become an export hit. The Jakarta–Bandung line in Indonesia, opened in 2023, is the first complete high-speed project of Chinese manufacture outside East Asia. Further projects in Southeast Asia (Thailand, Laos, Malaysia), in Hungary and Serbia, and in Africa are in planning or under construction – as part of the Belt and Road Initiative. European suppliers like Siemens or Alstom are increasingly losing contracts to Chinese state companies that build more cheaply and finance more flexibly.
In the other direction, Germany's rail industry has so far hardly been active in the Chinese market. Siemens supplied Velaro trains to China in the 2000s, whose technology was then further developed by CRRC, the Chinese state-owned company. Today CRRC dominates global rolling-stock manufacturing – and increasingly competes directly with Siemens Mobility and Alstom.