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Debate: High-speed trains

Updated: 2011-07-29 14:22

(China Daily)

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Should China halt or slow down the expansion of its bullet train network after the July 23 accident in Wenzhou, Zhejiang province? China Daily brings three diverse views on the subject.

Tragedy exposes railway system flaws

Hexie is the Chinese word for harmony. It was also the name of the Chinese high-speed train that crashed into another bullet train on July 23, an accident deadly enough to make the name sound like an empty slogan.

The tragedy turned the long-held fear that China's fast-expanding rail network is vulnerable to major disasters into reality.

Specialists have said that China's automatic high-speed train control system may not have been functioning properly at the time of the accident. The disaster is certain to deal a heavy blow to China as it seeks to export the bullet train system overseas, including to the United States. Over the years, China has strived to develop the system, which it hopes will boost its national pride.

Just more than four years have passed since China introduced high-speed trains. The country's rapidly growing railway network has expanded by leaps and bounds during that time, with high-speed trains running over more than 8,000 kilometers today - several times more extensive than Japan's Shinkansen network. China hopes to extend the network to 18,000 km by the end of 2020.

But it seems China's success in high-speed rail is the result of crash construction work intended to add an extra touch of glory. There is no denying that the rushed work has been made possible by slighting the safety of the high-speed railway system.

China's 10-trillion-yuan ($1.55 trillion) bullet train network project has been fraught with corruption. In February, Liu Zhijun was sacked as railways minister and arrested on suspicion of accepting huge sums as bribes from corporations tied to the project over the years.

While in office, Liu issued a directive that bullet trains should run along the Beijing-Shanghai route at 350 km an hour, hoping to make China's high-speed railway the world's fastest. His successor rescinded the policy and decided to set the maximum speed at 300 km an hour for safety reasons.

Passengers traveling on China's high-speed trains include expatriates, tourists and businesspeople from overseas. The seriousness of the July 23 accident must be taken to heart by the Chinese government. Beijing must conduct a thorough investigation into all aspects of its bullet train network, from its rolling stock to its operational routines.

China has said the trains operated on the Beijing-Shanghai route were modeled on the Tohoku Shinkansen's Hayate, a bullet train built by Kawasaki Heavy Industries, but has insisted that they were developed into a new creation through China's home-grown technology. Beijing has even applied for a global patent on its bullet train.

But the July 23 accident is bound to harm China's bullet train export drive.

The Yomiuri Shimbun/Asia News Network

Andre Vltchek

Criticism of China out of context

The deadliest high-speed train accident took place near the village of Eschede in Celle district of Lower Saxony, Germany, on June 3, 1998. It claimed 101 lives.

It is worth going back to the news reports from that time. International news agencies and newspapers expressed shock and sympathy, and tried to analyze the disaster. The accident did very little to evoke criticism of Germany's political or economic system in general or its approach toward railroads in particular.

In fact, many state-owned railways in Europe have been privatized in recent years. And the number of accidents have increased dramatically as railways suddenly came to be seen as something that should yield profit.

Let's move to Wenzhou in China's Zhejiang province, the scene of the bullet train accident on the night of July 23 in which 39 people were killed. It was an accident, terrible and regrettable, but definitely not extraordinary. Simple per capita calculations show China's rail system still appears to be a lot safer than that of Germany, Italy or Spain, not to speak of India or Indonesia.

But objectivity is not something that the Western media have in mind when covering events in China. Immediately after the accident, Western and Japanese propaganda went to work. Many Western reports were tailored to show that what had happened in China was something exceptional, which could rarely happen anywhere else in world. It is a common approach used in anti-Chinese propaganda, and its main goal is to discredit China's achievements.

In this case, a random look at just a few of the many train disasters in recent times could reveal the absurdity of the claims or suggestions that China's railways is hazardous or that it is being developed without safety concerns:

April 25, 2005: A train derails on a sharp curve and smashes into an apartment building in Amagasaki, Hyogo, Japan, killing 107 people and leaving 549 injured;

September 22, 2006: A train accident in Lathen, Emsland, Germany, kills 21 passengers and two maintenance workers and injures many more;

September 12, 2008: A train collision in Chatsworth, California, US, leaves 25 people dead and about 135 injured;

February 15, 2010: Two passenger trains collide head-on in Buizingen near Brussels, Belgium, killing 18 people and leaving 162 wounded.

Disasters are varied, often unpredictable, no matter how much effort we make to prevent them. Tragedies strike every year in rich European countries and in the United States. Poor countries like India and Indonesia lose dozens of lives almost every month to train accidents.

In the month preceding the Wenzhou tragedy, train accidents killed several people in the US, including 6 in Nevada on June 24, one in Maine on July 12 and two near Chicago on July 21. On July 10, the Kalka Mail derailed in Uttar Pradesh, India, killing about 70 people.

Yet no one ran the accidents as top international stories and no one questioned the entire European, American or Indian system because of failed safety systems or faulty tracks. It appears that anything that can hurt the credibility of China is immediately identified and inflated by Western propaganda.

A massive drive to connect people of a great nation by the greatest and fastest railway system has been inspiring millions worldwide, especially in the developing world. It is environmentally sound and a proof of how far Chinese technology has progressed in recent years.

China's railways - including the 8,000 kilometers of high-speed tracks - is symbolic of the changing world. It symbolizes the rise of not only China, but also a new Asia, bold and confident, proud and daring.

What the Western media have not said while criticizing China for the Wenzhou accident is that the high-speed rail system would still be saving thousands of lives, for bad infrastructure kills. For years, I have been living and working in developing countries. I have driven all over Africa, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Central America. In Uganda or Kenya, I have seen more fatalities on terrible roads, just driving 500 km. In Indonesia, people drown after their horrid ferries sink, they fall though rusty roofs or from trains to the more rusty floors to their death. Bad roads, railways, waterways and other modes of transportation kill tens of thousands of people a year in countries like India, Bangladesh and Indonesia.

If the most populated country has to depend on outmoded road transport and an outdated rail system, it would probably lose hundreds of thousands of people every year. This fact alone justifies the rapid expansion of the fast railway system in China. Safety standards should improve in China, as they should everywhere in the world. But it should not overshadow the fact that what China has built is one of the safest and most efficient transport networks on earth. Any basic statistical calculation would support this claim.

High-speed train tragedies are very dramatic, and tragic. They appear horrifying on television screens. So are plane crashes. Still, nobody would deny that it is safer to fly than to ride a motorbike.

Logic demands that China be saluted for its success in the fast rail system. It should be encouraged, too, because fast train networks not only improve lives, but also save lives and protect the environment. Accidents should be met with grief, but frankly speaking, they change nothing about correctness of a course. There is and should be no going back on the fast rail network for China.

The author is an American novelist, documentary filmmaker and investigative journalist.

Peh Shing Huei

The price of high speed is too high

For years, experts both in China and abroad have been warning that the country's high-speed rail network is careening toward disaster. They have cautioned time and again that high-speed or bullet trains have been going too fast, the network has been expanding too quickly and railway finances are too dodgy.

But the speed-obsessed Chinese rail authorities ignored the naysayers and insisted that China had pioneered a technology that can eventually make trains travel at 500 kilometers an hour - equivalent to the speed of small planes.

Such ambition will head into severe headwinds after the July 23 high-speed train collision in Wenzhou, Zhejiang province, which left at least 39 people dead and nearly 200 injured. It is the first major bullet train accident in China since they were introduced in 2007.

There have been clues that China has compromised safety in the race to build a high-speed rail network of 18,000 km by 2020 - enough to make almost four trips between Beijing and Singapore.

Several media reports have quoted insiders as saying that track construction has not been top-notch in terms of quality. The concrete bases for the tracks, for example, were made cheaply, without sufficient amounts of chemical hardening agents. This means tracks could bend over the years.

High-quality fly ash - a byproduct of burning coal - was almost definitely not used to strengthen the tracks, because the speed of construction has far exceeded its global availability, according to a 2008 study by a Chinese railway design institute.

The construction cycle is considered extremely fast by many experts, too. Contractors are laying rails even though the ministry is still formulating building standards. It takes only two years to build 300 km of high-speed railway in China, but a decade in other countries.

Moreover, when the trains started running, they ran at breakneck speed. Although modeled on Japan's famous Shinkansen design, China's high-speed trains zipped at up to 350 km an hour, more than 25 percent faster than what the Japanese allowed.

In Japan, the oldest and busiest Shinkansen line carries 400,000 passengers a day and has been running since 1964 without a fatal accident, and the average delay is usually around 10 seconds.

It does not help that China's railway finances have been incredibly spotty. A study conducted by China Minsheng Bank last year showed that the ministry's debts equaled 56 percent of its assets and could reach $455 billion, or 70 percent of its assets, by 2020. State auditors discovered that 187 million yuan ($29 million) had been siphoned off from the Beijing-Shanghai project. After that, Liu Zhijun was sacked as railways minister and detained for alleged corruption early this year. The scandal raised further safety concerns, for money meant for the high-speed rail network had instead lined officials' pockets.

But in their eagerness to build a prestige project, the authorities have largely ignored such warnings for years. Furthermore, high-speed railway was seen as providing a useful boost to the Chinese economy during the 2008 financial crisis. The government allocated the lion's share of the 4-trillion-yuan stimulus package to the sector, hoping that it would not only take off at home, but become China's high-tech export too.

China's bullet trains have been competing aggressively with the Europeans and Japanese for contracts in places as diverse as Iran, Russia and even California. It remains to be seen if China's high-speed trains can still conquer the world. But one thing is for certain - they will no longer be breaking world speed records.

The Straits Times/Asia News Network