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Speedy Trains Transform China
By KEITH BRADSHER
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/24/business/global/high-speed-train-system-is-huge-success-for-china.html
作者KEITH BRADSHER自2002年起担任纽约时报驻香港首席记者。
The high-speed rail station in Changsha, China, opened less than four years ago.
CHANGSHA, China — The cavernous rail station here for China’s new high-speed trains was nearly deserted when it opened less than four years ago.
Not anymore. Practically every train is sold out, although they leave for cities all over the country every several minutes. Long lines snake back from ticket windows under the 50-foot ceiling of white, gently undulating steel that floats cloudlike over the departure hall. An ambitious construction program will soon nearly double the size of the 16-platform station.
Just five years after China’s high-speed rail system opened, it is carrying nearly twice as many passengers each month as the country’s domestic airline industry. With traffic growing 28 percent a year for the last several years, China’s high-speed rail network will handle more passengers by early next year than the 54 million people a month who board domestic flights in the United States.
Li Xiaohung, a shoe factory worker, rides the 430-mile route from Guangzhou home to Changsha once a month to visit her daughter. Ms. Li used to see her daughter just once a year because the trip took a full day. Now she comes back in 2 hours 19 minutes.
Business executives like Zhen Qinan, a founder of the stock market in coastal Shenzhen, ride bullet trains to meetings all over China to avoid airport delays. The trains hurtle along at 186 miles an hour and are smooth, well-lighted, comfortable and almost invariably punctual, if not early. “I did not think it would change so quickly. High-speed trains seemed like a strange thing, but now it’s just part of our lives,” Mr. Zhen said.
China’s high-speed rail system has emerged as an unexpected success story. Economists and transportation experts cite it as one reason for China’s continued economic growth when other emerging economies are faltering. But it has not been without costs — high debt, many people relocated and a deadly accident. The corruption trials this summer of two former senior rail ministry officials have cast an unfavorable light on the bidding process for the rail lines.
The high-speed rail lines have, without a doubt, transformed China, often in unexpected ways.
For example, Chinese workers are now more productive. A paper for the World Bank by three consultants this year found that Chinese cities connected to the high-speed rail network, as more than 100 are already, are likely to experience broad growth in worker productivity. The productivity gains occur when companies find themselves within a couple of hours’ train ride of tens of millions of potential customers, employees and rivals.
“What we see very clearly is a change in the way a lot of companies are doing business,” said Gerald Ollivier, a World Bank senior transport specialist in Beijing.
Productivity gains to the economy appear to be of the same order as the combined economic gains from the usual arguments given for high-speed trains, including time savings for travelers, reduced noise, less air pollution and fuel savings, the World Bank consultants calculated.
Companies are opening research and development centers in more glamorous cities like Beijing and Shenzhen with abundant supplies of young, highly educated workers, and having them take frequent day trips to factories in cities with lower wages and land costs, like Tianjin and Changsha. Businesses are also customizing their products more through frequent meetings with clients in other cities, part of a broader move up the ladder toward higher value-added products.
Li Qingfu, the sales manager at the Changsha Don Lea Ramie Textile Technology Company, an exporter of women’s dresses and blouses, said he used to travel twice a year to Guangzhou, the commercial hub of southeastern China. The journey, similar in distance to traveling from Boston to Washington, required nearly a full day in each direction of winding up and down mountains by train or by car.
He now goes almost every month on the punctual bullet trains, which slice straight through the forested mountains and narrow valleys of southern Hunan province and northern Guangdong province in a little over two hours, traversing long tunnels and elevated concrete viaducts in rapid succession.
“More frequent access to my client base has allowed me to more quickly pick up on fashion changes in color and style. My orders have increased by 50 percent,” he said.
China relocated large numbers of families whose homes lay in the path of the tracks and quickly built new residential and commercial districts around high-speed train stations.
The new districts, typically located in inner suburbs, not downtown areas, have rapidly attracted large numbers of residents, partly because of China’s rapid urbanization. Enough farm families become city dwellers each year to fill New York City, part of a trend visible during a series of visits to the Changsha high-speed train station over the last four years.
When the station opened at the end of 2009 in an inner suburb full of faded state-owned factories, the neighborhood was initially silent. But by 2011, nearly 200 tower cranes could be counted building high-rises during the half-hour drive from downtown Changsha to the high-speed rail station. On a morning last month, only several dozen tower cranes were visible along nearly the same route. But a vibrant new area of apartment towers, commercial office buildings and hotels had opened near the train station.
China’s success may not be easily reproduced in the West, and not just because few places can match China’s pace of urbanization. China has four times the population of the United States, and the great bulk of its people live in the eastern third of the country, an area similar in size to the United States east of the Mississippi.
“Except for Boston to Washington, D.C., we don’t have the corridors” of high population density that China has, said C. William Ibbs, a professor of civil engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.
China’s high-speed rail program has been married to the world’s most ambitious subway construction program, as more than half the world’s large tunneling machines chisel away underneath big Chinese cities. That has meant easy access to high-speed rail stations for huge numbers of people — although the subway line to Changsha’s high-speed train station has been delayed after a deadly tunnel accident, a possible side effect of China’s haste.
New subway lines, rail lines and urban districts are part of China’s heavy dependence on investment-led growth. Despite repeated calls by Chinese leaders for a shift to more consumer-led growth, it shows little sign of changing. China’s new prime minister, Li Keqiang, publicly endorsed further expansion of the 5,900-mile high-speed rail network this summer. He said the country would invest $100 billion a year in its train system for years to come, mainly on high-speed rail.
The Chinese government is already struggling with nearly $500 billion in overall rail debt. Most of it was incurred for the high-speed rail system and financed with bank loans that must be rolled over as often as once a year. Using short-term loans made the financing look less risky on the balance sheets of the state-controlled banking system and held down borrowing costs. But the reliance on short-term credit has left the system vulnerable to any increase in interest rates.
“Even well-performing railways capable of covering their cash running costs and interest on their debt will almost certainly be unable to repay the principal without some long-term financing arrangements,” said a World Bank report last year.
Another impact: air travel. Train ridership has soared partly because China has set fares on high-speed rail lines at a little less than half of comparable airfares and then refrained from raising them. On routes that are four or five years old, prices have stayed the same as blue-collar wages have more than doubled. That has resulted in many workers, as well as business executives, switching to high-speed trains.
Airlines have largely halted service on routes of less than 300 miles when high-speed rail links open. They have reduced service on routes of 300 to 470 miles.
The double-digit annual wage increases give the Chinese enough disposable income that domestic airline traffic has still been growing 10 percent a year. That is the second-fastest growth among the world’s 10 largest domestic aviation markets, after India, which now faces a slowdown as the fall of the rupee has made aviation fuel exorbitantly expensive for air carriers there.
High-speed trains are not only allowing business managers from deep inside China to reach bigger markets. They are also prompting foreign executives to look deeper in China for suppliers as wages surge along the coast.
“We always used to have go down south to Guangzhou to meet with European clients, but now they come up to Changsha more often,” said Hwang Yin, a sales executive at the Changsha Qilu Import and Export Company.
The only drawback: “The high-speed trains are getting very crowded these days.”
高铁改变中国
http://cn.nytimes.com/china/20130925/c25chinarail/
翻译：经雷、土土
中国长沙——不到四年前，这里为全新的高速铁路建造了一座宽敞的火车站，刚落成后几乎无人光顾。
现在则不然。几乎每列火车都是满员，尽管开往全国各地的火车每隔几分钟就有一列。售票窗口前排着长队，50英尺（约合15米）高的白色钢结构屋顶带着柔和的曲线，仿佛云朵漂浮在出发大厅上空。一个大规模工程很快将把这个有16座站台的车站扩大将近一倍。
中国高铁系统投入使用仅仅五年，单月客流量已经是国内航空业客流量的将近两倍。过去几年里，中国高铁网络的客流量年增长率达28%，到明年初，它的单月客流量将超过每月运载5400万人次的美国国内航空系统。
在一家鞋厂打工的李小杭（音译）每个月从广州坐火车到430英里（约合690公里）外的长沙去探望她的女儿。以前她每年才能去一次，因为需要坐一整天的火车。现在只要2小时19分钟。
像滨海城市深圳一家证券交易所的筹建人甄秦安这样的企管人士，为了避免滞留机场，宁愿坐着子弹头列车前往全国各地开会。火车时速达186英里，平稳、明亮、舒适，而且几乎永远是准时的，甚至会提前。“我没想到变化会这么快。高铁本来感觉挺奇怪的，但是现在已经是我们生活的一部分了，”甄秦安说。
中国的高铁系统是一个出人意料的成功故事。在其他新兴经济体陷入低迷之际，有经济学家和交通运输专家称，这个系统是中国经济持续增长的原因之一。但其中也不无代价——债台高筑，众多民众搬迁，还有一场伤亡惨重的事故。今夏两名铁道部高官因腐败受审，也令人们对铁路工程招标过程产生了不满。
高铁无疑改变了中国，而且往往是以一种出乎意料的方式。
例如，中国工人的效率在提高。今年由三位顾问为世界银行(World Bank)撰写的报告指出，中国已经有超过100座城市连入了高铁网络，这些城市的生产力出现了很大提高。其中的原因就是，企业发现自己距离数以千万计的潜在消费者、雇员和竞争对手只有几个小时的火车车程。
“我们很明显可以看到，许多公司的运营方式在改变，”世界银行驻北京的资深交通专家杰拉尔·奥尔利维耶(Gerald Ollivier)说。
根据世界银行顾问的测算，生产力上升对经济的促进作用，和其他通常会跟高铁联系起来的经济促进作用——包括节省旅客时间，降低噪音，减少空气污染和节省燃料——看起来是相当的。
企业在北京、深圳这些比较繁华的城市设立研发中心，因为这些地方受过高等教育的年轻人很多，然后让他们频繁地出差去工厂——工厂建在薪资和土地成本较低的城市，比如天津和长沙，当天即可往返。通过和其他城市的客户进行更频繁的会谈，企业还能更多地对产品做出调整，以期让产品具备更高的附加值，这也是一个大趋势。
长沙东篱棉麻纺织品科技有限公司的销售经理李庆福说，往常他每年会去两次广州，那是中国南部的经济中心。东篱棉麻是一家从事女式裙装和衬衫出口的公司。这趟差的距离差不多是从波士顿到华盛顿，原来，坐火车或汽车需要翻山越岭，单程耗时将近一整天。
现在他基本上每个月都会坐准点的子弹头列车去一次，这种列车笔直地穿过湖南省南部和广东省北部的茂密山林和狭隘的山谷，全程只需两个小时多一点，中间密集分布着长距离的隧道和混凝土高架桥。
“更多地接触我的客户，让我可以即时跟上色彩和风尚的潮流。我的订单增长了50%，”他说。
中国搬迁了大量位于铁路沿线的居民，并在高铁车站周边迅速建起新的居住区和商业区。
这些新的区域一般位于城市近郊，不在市区内，但仍迅速吸引了众多居民，这跟中国的快速城市化有一定关系。每年从农民变身为城市居民的人，足以填满一座纽约市，过去四年来陆陆续续乘高铁前往长沙的过程中可以很明显看出这种变化。
原来，这座位于近郊的车站周边有大量破败的国有工厂，2009年末投入使用时，周围还是一片寂静。但到了2011年，从长沙市中心到火车站的半小时路程里可以看到将近200座塔吊。上个月的一个早上，在几乎相同的路线上只能看到几十座塔吊。但在火车站附近出现了一个热闹的新区，有住宅楼、商务写字楼和酒店。
中国的成功也许是西方很难模仿的，这不只是因为很少有哪个地方能出现中国的高速城市化进程。中国有四倍于美国的人口，其中一大部分人生活在东部的三分之一土地上，整块区域的面积大约相当于密西西比以东的美国。
“除了波士顿到华盛顿特区之外”，美国没有中国那种人口密度很高的“走廊”，加州伯克利大学的土木工程教授C·威廉·伊伯斯(C. William Ibbs)说。
中国的高铁计划已经跟世界上最雄心勃勃的地铁建设计划结合到了一起，目前全球一半以上的大型隧道机正在中国大城市底下开凿土石。这意味着大量人口可以方便地乘坐高铁出行。不过通往长沙高铁车站的地铁线计划已经被推迟，原因是隧道施工时出现了伤亡事故，这可能是中国急速发展进程的一个副效应。
新建的地铁线、铁路线，以及城市区域，是中国严重依赖“投资主导的增长”的现象的一部分。尽管中国领导人反复呼吁朝着更加倾向于“消费主导的增长”转变，但我们基本上没有看到变化的迹象。今年夏天，新任总理李克强公开赞同中国进一步延伸其5900英里长的高铁网络，他说，在未来几年中，中国每年将在铁路系统上投资1000亿美元，主要对象就是高铁系统。
应付近5000亿美元的铁路总债务已经让中国政府感到吃力，其中大部分债务都是高铁系统产生的，资金来自银行贷款，必须定期滚动，其频率有时甚至达到每年一次。由于使用的是短期贷款，这些融资在国家控制的银行系统的资产负债表上显得风险不高，而且借贷成本也比较低，但是对短期信贷的依赖，让高铁系统容易受到利率上升所带来的各种影响。
“一些业绩良好的铁路，即使可以支付现金运行成本，并且偿还债务利息，但如果没有长期融资计划，它们几乎也肯定无法偿还本金，”世界银行去年的一份报告说。
高铁也对空运产生了影响。列车载客量之所以飙升，部分原因在于中国高铁的票价不到飞机票价的一半。四、五年前开通的高铁线路，票价一直未作调整，而同期蓝领工人的工资增加了一倍多，这使得许多工人跟商界人士一样，转而乘坐高速列车。
高铁开通后，航空公司基本上停运了里程在300英里之内的航班，减少了300至470英里的航班。
两位数的年工资增长，给中国人带来了足够多的可支配收入，使得中国国内航空客运量仍以10％的速度增长。现在中国是世界10大国内航空市场增长第二快的国家，仅次于印度。目前印度的增长正在放缓，印度卢比的汇率下跌又让航空燃料变得过度昂贵，令航空公司难以承受。
高铁的开通，不仅让中国腹地的企业管理者们更加方便地接触到更大的市场，也促使外企高管深入中国腹地寻找供应商，以应对沿海地区工资成本的激增。
“我们以前总是南下广州去见欧洲客户，但是现在他们来长沙的时候更多了，”长沙齐鲁进出口公司的销售主管黄寅（Hwang Yin，音译）说。
唯一的缺点是：“高速列车现在变得非常拥挤。”
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