ESSAYS ON CHINA
VOLUME ONE
LARRY ROMANOFF
Contents
Chapter 1
-- History of Chinese Inventions
Chapter 2
-- Nüshu (女书)
Chapter 3
-- China’s High-Speed Trains. America, Where are You?
Chapter 4
-- Chinese and American Mobile Phone Systems
Chapter 5
-- China’s YiWu: Business Models You’ve Never Even Heard of
Chapter 6
-- From Shanghai to Chongqing: The World’s Most Expensive Railway
Chapter 7
-- Giving things names in the West and in China
Chapter 8
-- A Brief Introduction to Tibet
Chapter 9
-- Understanding China
Chapter 10 --
Some Things You Should Maybe Know About China
Chapter 11 --
Chinese Criminal Confessions
Chapter 12 --
DEALING WITH DEMONS
*
One more free
e-book
from this author
available at BOOKS
*
A sample of this
e-book:
Chapter 7
From Shanghai to Chongqing: The
World’s Most Expensive Railway
China's Yichang-Wanzhou Railway:
253 Bridges and 159 Tunnels
Conducting safety inspections./VCG Photo
The Yiwan
Railway
Work was finally
completed in 2010 on China’s Yiwan Railway, a route paralleling the lake formed
by the Three Gorges dam, a 380 km East – West line running through beautiful
but challenging mountainous terrain from Wuhan, the capital of Hubei Province,
and Yichang (the site of the Three Gorges Dam), to Wanzhou City, just East of
Chongqing.
The route was
originally proposed by Sun Yat-Sen in 1903 to shorten the rail journey between
the mountainous regions in the southwest and eastern parts of China. The
project initially began in 1909, but was repeatedly abandoned from
insurmountable technological problems due to the difficult natural environment,
until the central government decided to relaunch it in 2003.
This railway is
a part of one of China’s most important national transport corridors. The
project achieved its main objectives of increasing corridor capacity, removing
transport barriers, and reducing transport costs, and has already contributed
significantly to economic growth and poverty reduction in the project area, and
potentially benefitting the entire Western area.
China’s Tunnel
and Bridge Museum
This railway
line through a stretch of mountains on the edge of the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau
was China’s most difficult and expensive to build. It took a staggering seven
years and 50,000 workers to dig and drill 159 tunnels and build 253 bridges. In
one extreme case, it took nearly six years to drill a tunnel through Qiyue
Mountain along the route. Of the railway’s total length of 380 Kms, 75% percent
or 280 Kms, consists of bridges and tunnels.
Underwater tunnel
Each and every
kilometer of the railway contains at least one bridge or one tunnel, most often
one of each, leading the locals to refer to the railway as the “tunnel and
bridge museum.”
60 Million RMB
per Kilometer
The railway goes
through some of the most difficult terrain in the country, with many sections
running through karst topography, and the railway’s chief designer claiming
this to have been the hardest project he had ever worked on. The line involved
more than 20 billion RMB in total investment, about 60 million for each
kilometer, and is China’s most expensive railway, costing double the 30 million
RMB per kilometer for the Qinghai-Tibet Railway which was the second most
expensive.
It is a bit of
anticlimactic irony that this railway required so much time to build that
railway technology surpassed it during its own construction. The
Yichang-Wanzhou railway was designed for trains traveling at about 200 kph,
which were the fastest at the time construction began, but was two generations
behind by the time construction was completed. Given the construction
difficulties, there is probably no one in China interested in upgrading this
railway in the immediate future.
This railway
reduced the Yichang-Wanzhou travel time from 22 hours to just five hours, and
travel time from other Central or East China cities to Southwest part of the
country are now also significantly shorter, bringing new opportunities for
residents who live in the steep and remote Wuling mountains. One local resident
said, “We used to pay 100 Yuan (US$15) for a one-day bus trip to Yichang
before. Now, 30 Yuan can get us there in two hours.”
Infrastructure
and Privatisation
The Temple of Heaven
China has
invested heavily in railways in remote areas like the Three Gorges, Qinghai,
Xinjiang and Tibet, in an attempt to connect the length and breadth of the
country with convenient and fast transportation. Chinese leaders recognised
from the beginning that economic development follows transportation, and
thus maintaining control of the transportation infrastructure derives from a
determination to distribute the benefits of development to the entire nation.
The reality is
that not all infrastructure is destined to be financially profitable –
profitability being the only measure by Western standards. A
privately-developed railway system would be built only on the most profitable
routes, those likely to amass billions for their owners but that would leave
perhaps half the nation destitute for transportation and sentenced to perpetual
poverty. Thus, railway privatisation would saddle China’s central government
with the costs of building all the unprofitable routes without benefitting from
the profitable segments. This is one of Western capitalism’s main mantras:
privatise the profits and socialise the losses.
It was the same
with mobile communications. Recognising the development potential attributable
to rapid and inexpensive communications, China’s central government decreed
that the entire population must benefit equally, or at least have more equal
opportunity to benefit, and thus the entire country was wired, including the
deserts and the most difficult mountainous areas (such as Wuling) with sparse
population and no realistic hope of profitability. But with China’s universal
mobile phone system, farmers in some of the most remote mountain villages are
on the internet daily, learning better agricultural methods, checking and
negotiating prices and arranging sales. And with this new railway through some
of nature’s most formidable barriers, local farmers and business people (who
would have been ignored by private enterprise) can not only easily arrange
delivery of their produce but quickly travel between regional population
centers, stimulating enormous increases in tourism and all manner of commerce,
thus benefiting the entire region.
*
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https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Essays-on-China-Volume-One.pdf
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LARRY ROMANOFF
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Copyright © Larry Romanoff, Blue Moon of Shanghai,Moon of Shanghai 2023
