【10.04.12 纽约时报】China Looks to Rails to Carry Its Next Economic Boom

青蛙小王子

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/13/business/global/13inside.html

BEIJING — In southwestern Yunnan Province, giant concrete pillars bestride the fields, tracing the route of one of scores of new rail lines that China is building.
In western Xinjiang, construction crews toil on a lonely line crossing the desert wastes to the Silk Road city of Kashgar.
From one end of the country to the other, China is in the midst of a railroad boom that promises to transform the world’s third-largest economy, after those of the United States and Japan.
By making it easier to move people and goods, the railroad mania will gradually shift the center of economic gravity inland, accelerating the development of central and western China in an echo of America’s experience in the 19th century.
Jing Ulrich, chairwoman of the China equities and commodities business at J.P. Morgan, said she also saw comparisons with the construction of the Interstate highway system in the United States and the shinkansen high-speed rail network in Japan, both of which brought far-reaching socioeconomic changes.
“However, due to the immense scale of construction, faster service speeds and China’s vast population, the transformative impact may be even more profound,” she said in a recent report.
As better transportation links encourage manufacturers to relocate away from the coast, demand for property in the interior will grow, lifting consumer sentiment and retail sales. The railroads will also be a boon for tourism, Ms. Ulrich said.
Taking freight and passenger traffic together, China already has the world’s busiest railroad system. But measured by the size of the country and the needs of 1.3 billion people, the system is puny.
The density of the network, measured in kilometers of line per million inhabitants, is less than a tenth of those in Russia, the United States or Canada, a seventh of the European Union’s and about a third of Japan’s, according to the World Bank.
This sparse network, totaling 86,000 kilometers, or 54,000 miles, at the end of 2009, is so overburdened that it carries a quarter of the world’s rail traffic on about 6 percent of the world’s lines.
It is no wonder that China suffers periodic energy shortages, because coal trains are delayed in reaching power stations as they are shunted onto sidings to make way for passenger trains.
Well aware of the problem, the government turned the financial crisis into an opportunity to fast-forward its long-term plan to lengthen the network to 120,000 kilometers by 2020.
Railroad construction invigorated the economy last year by creating six million jobs and generating demand for 20 million tons of steel and 120 million tons of cement.
“If the policy is that large cash infusions create jobs, then from a transport perspective railways is certainly the place where the financing is necessary,” said John Scales, the lead transportation policy specialist for the World Bank in Beijing.
By the end of 2009, work was under way on no less than 33,000 kilometers of lines, according to analysts at Macquarie, the investment bank.
With the Ministry of Railways budgeting a 17 percent increase in spending this year to 823 billion renminbi, or $120 billion, the analysts said that they believed the 120,000-kilometer target could be reached as soon as 2015 and that they saw a good chance that it would be raised to 150,000 kilometers.
The economic case for expanding the rail network is clear-cut. During a country’s development phase, total demand for transportation tends to grow faster than income.
But some critics say China is putting too much emphasis on high-speed rail lines capable of accommodating speeds of as much as 350 kilometers an hour.
China already has the longest operational high-speed network in the world, at 6,552 kilometers, and it intends to double that total to 13,000 kilometers by 2012 by upgrading existing track and building new lines.
When the high-speed line linking Beijing and Shanghai opens by early 2012, the journey time will be cut to 4 hours from 10.
China is rightly proud of the giant strides it is making. It is seeking to build a high-speed rail line in California and is bidding for a contract to link Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia.
At home, the aim is to reduce if possible the travel time to each provincial capital from second-tier towns in that province to two hours or less, bringing economic benefits.
Yet Zhao Jian, a professor at Jiaotong University in Beijing, who specializes in rail economics, is scathing in his assessment of what he calls the “blind pursuit of speed.”
He said in the monthly journal Comprehensive Transportation that China could have built an extra 30,000 kilometers of conventional track with the money saved from what he characterized as “extravagant” high-speed lines.
China, he argued, does not have the technological experience to be sure of operating such lines safely. Moreover, high-speed trains gobble up energy and subsidies.
“There is no high-speed railway in the world that can be financially self-sustaining,” Mr. Zhao said in the journal. “The large-scale construction of high-speed railway passenger lines in China will definitely be confronted with huge risks.”
High-speed rail travel could even pose social and political risks, he added, since fares on the new trains are three times as high as those on ordinary trains.
In addition, he said, the Ministry of Railways is deliberately reducing the frequency of slower trains to make passengers use the new services.
“This will be met with strong social discontent,” Mr. Zhao said.
Mr. Scales, the World Bank expert, sees things differently.
“In other parts of the world, nobody would think of designing new passenger lines for less than 350 kilometers per hour,” he said. “So it’s very reasonable.”
He added, “And remember that many of the dedicated passenger lines are not built to move passengers, but to get passengers off the freight lines. That’s where the real bottlenecks are.”