I am traveling in China and seeing two futures for America: one where we rush to play catch-up and the other where we fall even further behind.
China has a public transportation system that works — with trains, 4,000 miles of high-speed rail, bus and even public bikes. America seems to be using training wheels!
Tom Watkins
China is on a mission to continue reshaping its rice paddies, steppes and the mountains around a rail service that will do for the country what President Eisenhower’s Interstate highway system did for America in the 1950s. There are plans to construct a 16,000-mile, high-speed network by 2020. China’s efforts are driving the country forward, facilitating mobility and creating economic and technology development.
China Rails
The New Yorker Magazine described the historic Chinese rail system this way: “China’s trains had always been a symbol of backwardness. More than a century ago, when the Empress Dowager was given a miniature engine to bear her about the Imperial City, she found the “fire cart” so insulting to the natural order that she banished it and insisted that her carriage continue to be dragged by eunuchs.
Chairman Mao crisscrossed the countryside with tracks, partly for military use, but travel for ordinary people remained a misery of delayed, overcrowded trains nicknamed for the soot-stained color of the carriages: “green skins” were the slowest, “red skins” scarcely better. Even after Japan pioneered high-speed trains, in the nineteen-fifties, and Europe followed suit, China lagged behind, with what the state press bemoaned as two inches of track per person—“less than the length of a cigarette.”
The expansion of China’s rail service has certainly not been entirely smooth. Design flaws and sloppy management caused a 2011 bullet train crash in Wenzhou that killed 40 people and seriously injured over 200, the Chinese government says. The crash led many Chinese to accuse the government of putting development and profit before safety.
Yet, rail service in China has advanced a great deal since my first experience here in 1989, when I shared a jam-packed, non-air conditioned train car along with what felt like the entire population of China on a hard seat bench, if you could find space to sit at all. When I walked through the railcars over 20 years ago, I dodged bodies crouched on the floor, sharing the same space with chickens, pigs, sunflower seed shells and big puddles of phlegm.
Today, China, with the world’s longest high-speed rail network, is reportedly planning to spend in excess of $1 trillion (U.S.) on expanding its railway system. This is juxtaposed to the U.S., which hopes to build our first high-speed rail line , less than 85 miles linking Tampa and Orlando. Our efforts are “Mickey Mouse” in comparison.
The Beijing-Tianjin inter-city Express railway can catapult you 73 miles in 30 minutes, reaching speeds approaching 210 mph. The rail line between Wuhan and Guangzhou covers 600 miles in three hours, traveling at 220 mph. The journey on the old train took 11 hours.
The Chinese are notorious for traveling the world and studying best practices then returning to China to put these ideas to work — we would do well to emulate this practice.
The United States needs a massive public works strategy, backed up with extensive investment, to ride the rails to increasing prosperity.
Crossing China on the 48-hour Beijing-Lhasa (Tibet) high-speed rail in 2007, I had a front seat to the extensive infrastructure investments China is making in rail, tunnels, bridges, roads and train stations that seem to dot the landscape.
I recall a 2008 trip to meet a friend at the Shanghai Railway Station for a day trip to Suzhou. I was feeling rather proud of my mediocre Chinese language skills when I hailed a dadi (taxi) and told the driver to (“qing dai wo qu huo che zhan”) or take me to the train station. He turned to me and responded in perfect English, “Which one?” Thinking of the 25-year-old, now abandoned hulk of the Michigan Central Train Station near downtown Detroit, I took a guess and chose one of the two train stations the dadi driver offered.
There are two modern train stations in Shanghai. And the high-speed Shanghai Maglev Train shoots you from the airport to the congested central city, a distance of 19 miles, in slightly more than seven minutes at speeds that top 268 mph.
Most people in Michigan have never heard of Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, Mianyang, Xian, Chongqing, or Changsha. Yet a rail system exists, connecting these once-isolated provinces and Chinese cities.
America Needs Training Wheels
Detroit is one of the only major metropolitan areas in the U.S. and indeed, the world, without a mass transit system. Michigan and other prominent regions of the U.S. need to join the 21st century and develop a sensible, affordable and effective mass transportation system.
The lack of a mass transit system is an anchor, pulling down our ability to climb out of the economic pit in which we find ourselves.
From New York, Washington D.C., to the Beijing-Lhasa (Tibet) train, intra-city mass transit and express railways not only move people, but also accelerate the movement of ideas and economies.
Learning From China
We could build the rails and the trains right here in America, indeed helping to “move us forward” on two fronts. The question remains — will we? As China keeps chugging along … we in America need to be laying rail.
Tom Watkins has had a lifelong interest in China sparked by a great fourth grade teacher. He has worked for more than 3 decades to build economic, educational and cultural ties between the US and China. He is advisor to the University of Michigan Confucius Institute, Michigan’s Economic Development Corporation and Detroit Chinese Business Association. Follow him on twitter: #tdwatkins88 or email him at: tdwatkins88@gmail.com
