Sweating bullets over new Chinese
train By Kosuke Takahashi
SHANGHAI - The bitter wartime history between
China and Japan and strengthening of Sino-French
relations might trump price and technology in deciding
one of the world's most lucrative engineering projects:
China's high-speed rail link between Beijing and
Shanghai, known as the bullet train, expected to be a
centerpiece of the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in China.
No one expects the contract for this high-speed
railway link to hinge only on politics, but it could be
one measure of how Sino-Japanese political relations
work these days. The Chinese government is expected to
decide on the contract in coming months; how it decides
will say a lot about pragmatic power politics in Asia.
It also could have implications for China-United States
relations, and even Taiwan.
The key here is
twofold: One, because of China's war memories and
politically sensitive issues between Japan and China,
such as Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's
repeated visits to the controversial Yasukuni Shrine
memorializing the war dead, some in the Chinese
government might want to link economics closely to
politics, rather than separating the two and making a
pragmatic economic decision to award Tokyo the
bullet-train contract. Others argue that the expanding
Sino-Japanese economic relationship is so important that
the contract should be awarded to Tokyo.
Two,
recently deepening Sino-French relations might mean
China will award France the railway contract. In return,
Paris would continue to encourage the European Union to
lift the arms sales embargo against China, to the
annoyance of Washington. Already, France has strongly
and publicly urged lifting the embargo (imposed after
the Tiananmen massacre) and supported China's claim to
sovereignty over Taiwan, a move greatly appreciated by
Beijing.
China first proposed the
Beijing-Shanghai High-Speed Railway Project in 1997. A
massive national project, the cost of the approximately
1,300-kilometer railway has been estimated at 130
billion yuan (US$5.7 billion). French engineering giant
Alstom's bullet train TGV, German super train Inter-City
Express (ICE) and Japan's bullet train Shinkansen are
vying to get the award of the tender, which is expected
to be issued this year.
Recently, however, some
news reports indicated that major projects, including
the rail link, are on hold because of their high cost
and because the Chinese economy is growing so fast that
it must be dramatically cooled down. There has been no
official Chinese confirmation, however, about putting
the bullet-train project - part of the 2008 Olympics
showcase - on hold.
In the earlier stage,
Germany's Siemens' high-speed magnetic-levitation
(Maglev) railway technique was poised to be a top
bidder. By January, however, China had abandoned plans
to use that technology in favor of less expensive
conventional wheel-track trains, according to the China
Daily. The Maglev cost can be as high as $45 million to
$60 million per kilometer, twice that of wheel-track
lines, the newspaper reported. Until then, Siemens had
been a strong candidate because it had already developed
the Maglev train in Shanghai, which is plying the 30km
Shanghai airport link at 430 km/h, making it the world's
fastest train in commercial service. German government
and financial circles, however, are now touting
conventional wheel-track trains, throwing Berlin's hat
into the ring once again.
Shinkansen has
tech, safety track record The rail project has
been viewed as a contest among Japan, Germany and France
to show off their technological and operational prowess
for railways. Although their operating speeds are almost
the same, at about 300 km/h, Japan's Shinkansen operates
with electric drive motors while the French TGV and
German ICE use high-speed locomotives. In terms of
energy efficiency, Shinkansen excels: its power
consumption per passenger is said to be only 40-50
percent of TGV and 50-90 percent of ICE.
Shinkansen also has a long record of system
safety, better than the two Europeans. It has never
experienced any fatal accidents since its introduction
in 1964, while an ICE derailment left 100 people dead in
June 1998; a TGV derailment occurred in October 2001,
leaving five people slightly injured.
Japanese
and French marketing strategies in Asia have been almost
dead even so far. In October, Taiwan is to inaugurate
Japan's Shinkansen system between Taipei and the
southern port of Kaohsiung. Alstom, on the other hand,
provided most of the technology for South Korea's new
high-speed train between Seoul and the southern cities
of Busan and Mokpo, which was inaugurated on April 1.
Meanwhile, German ICE has fallen behind in Asia in its
marketing and sales.
War memories affect
economic decisions Although Shinkansen has the
safety record and enhanced energy efficiency, the most
troublesome issue for Japan is anti-Japanese sentiment
among the Chinese. China's latent anti-Japanese feelings
were especially aroused by Koizumi's repeated visits to
Tokyo's Yasukuni Shrine, the Shinto shrine dedicated to
Japan's war dead, including class A war criminals of
World War II. Chinese sentiment was also inflamed by the
arrest in late March by Japanese police of seven Chinese
activists who landed on one of the disputed Senkaku
(called Diaoyu in China) Islands in the East China Sea.
These unsettled past issues again exposed the
difficulties lurking in Sino-Japanese relations (see Island feud a barometer of China-Japan
ties, May 6).
Moreover, the older Chinese
generations, who remember the South Manchuria Railway Co
founded by the Japanese military government in 1906
after the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05), are said to
oppose any Japanese trains running on the Chinese
mainland. Some Chinese are carrying out an Internet
petition campaign in a bid to thwart the Beijing's
possible adoption of Japan's Shinkansen. Chinese popular
resistance would be a visible and measurable challenge
for both Chinese and Japanese governments in the coming
months.
Indeed, Japan's wartime history has cost
Japan at least one other lucrative contract. Tokyo
failed to win the Korean bullet train contract because
of the wartime comfort-women issue, in the spotlight
around 1993. During the war, Korean and other Asian
women were rounded up and kept in brothels for Japanese
troops; South Korea sought an official apology. The
issue became a major diplomatic problem between Seoul
and Tokyo, and Japan lost out on the train contract.
Today Japanese business leaders and bureaucrats do not
want history to repeat itself in China with the bullet
train.
Strengthening Sino-China
relations Meanwhile, China and France appear keen
to expand their relations. To celebrate the 40th
anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic ties
between the two countries, France is now holding "China
Year" and China is reciprocating with one for France.
Proclaiming their affinity to the rest of the world, the
French government invited Chinese President Hu Jintao as
a state guest to Paris this past January. Moreover, just
before the Taiwan presidential election in March, France
and China conducted their first-ever joint naval
military exercises.
For China, behind this
recent diplomatic warmth is the Taiwan problem. China
aims to encourage France further to lift the EU embargo
on arms exports to China, which would concern the US
because it might destabilize the regional strategic
arrangement in North Asia and enhance China's ability to
attack Taiwan. Beijing calls Taiwan a renegade province;
many in Taiwan, however, consider themselves distinct
from China and a separate, sovereign nation. China has
not ruled out the use of force at some point to reunify
Taiwan and the mainland.
Paris expects that
close relations with Beijing would bring new business
opportunities to its military-industrial complex,
including Airbus Industrie, the major rival of the US
aircraft maker Boeing in the world's skyliner markets.
Other commercial, non-military benefits would also flow
to France. Furthermore, France needs to secure strong
support from China over the location of the
International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER)
project, the world's first sustained nuclear fusion
reactor venture. It also involves Japan, China, the
European Union, Russia, South Korea, and the United
States.
Japan and France are currently bidding
to build the ITER reactor, and China's support is
crucial. The US and South Korea are supporting Japan,
while China and Russia support France. The support of
China remains a key factor in realizing the
international project for either Japan or France.
Negotiations at the vice-ministerial level are expected
to be held late this month, possibly in Vienna, but the
final decision is not expected to be reached in the near
future.
Besides these factors, the underlying
common interests and factors that unite France and China
appear to be their strategies to seek a genuinely
multipolar world, to offset and counterbalance US
President George W Bush's pursuit of unilateralism,
especially in the US-led war in Iraq. French President
Jacques Chirac even invited Hu to address in France's
lower chamber of parliament, a major honor, although
more than half the 577 members of that chamber did not
turn up - apparently to demonstrate their distaste for
China's human-rights record.
Germany should not
be counted out of the running in the rail project. Early
this month, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao paid an official
visit to Germany and reportedly discussed the project,
among other issues, with German President Johannes Rau.
Might China's largest transportation artery boil
down to pure economics or politics cloaked conveniently
in nationalism? Early this month, one Shanghai-based
Chinese journalist said, on condition of anonymity, "The
Chinese government wants to award it to Japan, but they
will give Japan severe competition up to the last
minute, because they want Japan to pay for the railway
costs as much as possible, reducing [the] Chinese
burden."
China keenly interested in train
technology Japan is willing to sell China both
software and hardware for Shinkansen, that is,
compartments, signals and a traffic-control system,
which Japanese officials believe essential to run
Shinkansen safely in another country. But China is
reportedly interested mainly in buying any kind of
technology, expecting the nation's enhanced domestic
production system to suffice in the future for the
hardware. France and Germany, however, may be more
amenable to China's emphasis on technology over
hardware.
Japanese bureaucrats and business
leaders envisage Japan's bullet trains not only linking
Beijing and Shanghai but also crossing the Chinese
mainland, just as the bullet trains have covered Japan's
main island Honshu with a network of lines connecting
Tokyo with most of the island's major cities and Fukuoka
on the island of Kyushu. Experts estimate China's
railways would eventually total 8,000-10,000km, four to
five times as long as the network served by Shinkansen
in Japan.
Japanese leaders too have been busy
selling Shinkansen to China. In April 2003, the Japan
Business Federation, or Keidanren, established the
internal promotion committee on China's high-speed rail
link, which consists of 39 Japanese companies including
trading houses Mitsubishi Corp and Marubeni Corp.
"We have been offering the expertise to the
Chinese government [for] more than 20 years and will
continue to do so," Masato Ohno, director of
international affairs at Japan's Ministry of Land,
Infrastructure and Transportation, told Asia Times
Online. "Although Japan is in a difficult situation due
to political matters, we hope the Chinese government
will decide the winner in an objectively reasonable way
by thinking about their long-term national interest."
But China's bullet-train issue has already
become involved in world politics; whether economic
objectivity is possible remains to be seen.
Kosuke Takahashi is a former staff
writer at the Asahi Shimbun and is currently a freelance
correspondent based in Tokyo. He can be contacted atkosuke_everonward@ybb.ne.jp.
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