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China's workin' on the
railroad
By Michael Mackey
Sterling Seagrave, in his non-academic
history of Republican China's pre-eminent Soong
family, the Soong Dynasty, recounts that
toward the end of his life the founding father of
modern China, Dr Sun Yat-sen took an interest,
either wistful or distracting, in a potential
Chinese national railway system. Eighty-plus years
on, that dream is starting to come to full
fruition.
While in the age of airplanes
and the Internet, trains don't symbolize the same
technological and national advancement they meant
then, rail is still a key part of China's current
development strategy. The first point about
Chinese railways is the most basic: the network is
comprehensive and nationwide, and, despite various
problems, is being expanded, upgraded, and
increasingly connected to the rest of the world.
It is also big: the
third largest in the world at 75,000 kilometers,
behind only America at 230,000km, and Russia
at 85,800km. Historical figures show the scale
of development: in 1949, China had only 21,800km of
railway lines, of which only 11,000 was open to
traffic. By 1999, the total had risen to 57,900km.
Clearly, a great deal of hard work - and heavy
government spending - was behind the fulfillment
of Dr Sun's dream.
China's extensive plans
for further expansion of the rail network exist in
the context of a general increase of
infrastructure spending, which doesn't include
just hardware, such as ports, roads and tracks,
but invisible essentials such as broadband. The
rail infrastructure plans are extensive and,
according to reports, a government priority; with
the economy starting to clog at certain key
junctures, both new lines and capacity expansion
of existing lines are needed. "It will be the
[railway] ministry's top priority to break the
rail bottlenecks," according to the official
media.
New track plans
In the next five years, ie its 2006-2010
work program, the Ministry of Railways will build 10,000km
of new or updated track, bringing the national
total to 85,000. (Whether they will attempt to
surpass Russia, their former communist rival, in
that timeframe is speculation; but once it is
done expect some announcement.) This will include
11 new passenger lines and seven improved
lines. Plans call for the network to total 100,000km by
2020.
The
most controversial aspect of these
plans, outside China at least, has been the rail
line linking Tibet to the rest of China (aka the
Qinghai-Tibet railway), scheduled for completion
in 2007. The Lhasa River Bridge, a landmark
project on this line, was recently completed.
The 928 meter bridge faces the Potala
Palace, the historic residence of the Dalai Lamas,
and the bridge was designed to look like a yak, an
animal native to the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. (A
nice touch, albeit perhaps a tad patronizing.)
Of the newly
laid line, some 4,000km will be double-tracked
and 6,000km will be electrified, meaning that out
of the total 85,000km, some 35,000km, around 40%, will
be either double tracked or electrified.
Thus, technological upgrading is being planned and built,
not just additional mileage. Also, the ministry
is hardly resting up this year in preparation for
the next five-year plan. China will invest
100 billion yuan (US$12.08 billion) in building railways in
2005, almost doubling the spending of the
previous year, according to Railways Minister Liu Zhijan.
It will also launch 58 new projects and continue
48 projects from the previous year, involving the building
of 714km of new lines, 523km of double-track lines and
875km of electric rail routes as well as starting 805km
of new lines and 396km of double-track lines.
Light rail set to expand
Woven
into the rail plans is a growing use of light
rail, which is needed to meet rapidly rising
demand for subsidiary or feeder lines -
principally for moving passengers around urban
conurbations such as the Pearl River Delta (which
includes Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Dongguan, Guangzhou,
Zhuhai, and Macau), Bohai Bay (including the
Beijing and Tianjin metropolitan areas), and the
lesser economic hot spot of Shandong's Jiaodong
Peninsula.
On Jiaodong, a plan to create
a "one hour economic circle" (a zone where
any destination is reachable within one hour) will
see a network of 725km of light rail built to cover
the cities of Qingdao, Yantai and Weihai by 2010.
"In the long run, the Jiaodong Peninsula will be
blessed with an urban track transport that is
capable of handling half of the area's public
transport demand," said Zhao Dong, director in
charge of the project's planning. Some other
cities (and it's a long list) should have been so
lucky.
Labor mobility issues
In
the next 20-30 years, it is estimated that a
jaw-dropping 400 million people will leave China's
rural areas and head to the cities. What is being
built now is the infrastructure that will
facilitate the movement of that labor force, both
from the rural areas to the towns and within the
new urban areas. Within China, labor will continue
for the foreseeable future to move by land, and
not by air it does in some other countries. During
the most recent Spring Festival (what used to be
called the New Year holiday) some 145 million
people, over a tenth of the population, were
estimated to have traveled by rail, some 53
million by road and only 12 million by air.
There are, according to one estimate,
some 31 million migrant workers in the Pearl
River Delta (PRD) alone - around one-quarter of China's total
transient workforce. Not surprisingly, the
authorities in the PRD are foremost among those
building a good public transport infrastructure,
one that connects well to the principal rail
lines. Thus, rail for China is one way to prevent
the biggest bottleneck of all - labor shortages.
Cargo woes
It is on the cargo
side, especially containerized freight, that there
are problems - big ones. The problems
manifest themselves in ways that are familiar the
world over. "Rather expensive, and not reliable at
all," was the view of one international
transport company executive when queried about rail
freight in China. A key and recurring complaint is the
lack of freight schedules: "you have to be
patient," was the weary view of the executive.
Shanghai to Beijing, which on an express passenger
train is a rather comfortable 12-hour overnighter,
can take a week "normally" added another executive
in the same company.
A more comprehensive list of
shortcomings came from an executive in another
company, this time an international logistics
company, who again preferred to remain anonymous.
The list included "no intermodal facilities, lack
of tracking, low bridges, extensive delays,
misroutings, unreasonable surcharges and no
service standards whatsoever". So exasperating is
this situation that the executive admitted, "I'd
much rather put it on a blue truck," a reference
to China's cottage trucking industry that
generally uses old trucks built by one of China's
homegrown manufacturers that will, amidst clouds
of acrid black smoke, get goods from point A to
point B.
Supplementing this list, another
executive, equally keen not to be named,
underlined the general lack of things which are
important when goods are being moved: the lack of
door-to-door services; the lack of an agency to
deal with requests; and the lack of security.
Pilferage, especially when the cartons are marked
with the names of international electronics
companies, is a real problem.
But
the overriding problem,
at the moment, is a chronic shortage of
capacity. "By China's own admission, it can
only handle 30% of freight demand," said Paul French,
a consultant with Access Asia. The reason, he
and others say, is simple - a choice of priorities within
the administration. "Passenger rail is
remarkably efficient," said Mark Millar, director of
the China Supply Chain, "because that is the
priority. The second priority is to move bulk goods."
This means things such as oil, grain, iron ore
and coal; and coal is, so to speak, more equal than
the others.
What has happened has been
that China's phenomenal economic growth has
created an insatiable demand for energy, most of
which is coal-generated. So moving coal around has
become the focus of bulk freight services, for
fear that already straining energy supplies might
falter over summer. "The railways have had to be
obsessed with shipping coal around," explained
French. "That's an order from the CMC (Central
Military Commission). Coal itself is a crisis
industry, but now it's totally messed up the rail
industry." According to one source, half the
country's rail transport is now devoted to
transporting coal, with demand having leapt so
quickly and unexpectedly that the rail system has
not been able to cope, and the whole system has
become one huge bottleneck with an astonishing 65%
of freight requests having to be refused.
And there's more. Originally the
expectation was that this year would see bad
harvests, but that turned out not to be the case,
so trucks that were expected to be available for
other commodities are now being used to move
grain, which has compounded the effects of the
rail capacity shortage. What China needs is a
fundamental overhaul of its currently wasting rail
assets.
Tomorrow: The
prospects for railway reform
Michael Mackey is
a Shanghai-based freelance writer.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
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on sales, syndication and republishing.) |
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