 |
 |
JANET JARMAN/CONTACT PRESS IMAGES FOR TIME
Workers dig a railway tunnel in Jiangxi province
|
|
Liu Zhukang's fortune seeking took him to the shores of America. He paid a snakehead, a trafficker in humans, $12,000 to sneak him there. But immigration officials nabbed the skinny native of Fujian province and sent him home. That's probably the best thing that ever happened to 30-year-old Liu. Instead of living a dozen to a room and scrubbing dishes in New York City, he's guiding an earthmover as it hauls rubble from the latest dynamite blast to shake the mountains of central Jiangxi province. Liu, who will spend the next 18 months digging a three-kilometer tunnel, is one of thousands of railway workers along this new main line run. His company has already built tracks that lash together China's booming eastern seaboard; now it's moving into more remote regions. For the relative fortune of $350 a month, Liu says, "I can work on the railroad the rest of my life."
Or for many lifetimes. China is in the middle of the biggest rail build-out since Europe's great expansion in the years before World War I, a track-laying orgy on par with America's in the 19th century. Like the coolies who stitched together the U.S. by building the Transcontinental Railroad across the country in the 1860s, Chinese workers are adding about 1,500 kilometers of new lines each year to the current 70,000 kilometers of routes—at an annual cost of $6 billion. In the next decade the country will have enough lines to circle the earth twice and overtake Russia with the world's second biggest rail network. And these aren't waddling iron roosters. The world's highest railway will whiz passengers across Tibetan passes on their way to Lhasa in air so thin they'll need pressurized cabins. A ferry will carry freight trains across the Bo Hai, depositing them on tracks running to the key Manchurian port of Dalian. Shanghai is building a rail that will literally float trains in the air, and high-speed lines faster than those in France or Japan will lace China's major cities. The goal is to speed travel through the booming eastern seaboard and link the region to China's impoverished hinterland with a grid of eight north-south and eight east-west lines. Far more is at stake than conquering the wilderness or building showcase projects. Failure to tie a steel bond that will integrate China's rural economy with the booming cities, says Li Shantong of the government's Development Research Center, "could ignite political instability."
For a look at the changes a rail line brings, drop by Taotou township in remote Yunnan province. The outside world first reached Taotou 2,000 years ago when traders cut a byway from the fabled Silk Road down through the region's karst mountains toward the Burmese border. Its outline still slices through steep fern-covered cliffs that rise above a perilous asphalt road, which these days is strewn with boulders loosened by seasonal downpours. Transportation hasn't improved much here since the days of Christ, and that has kept it on the World Bank's list of China's poorest counties. But on June 12 at precisely 9:26 a.m., time caught up. An electric locomotive hauling 60 freight cars rushed past dozens of curious peasants who turned out to admire China's newest rail line. Over the clacking wheels, Vice Mayor Tao Tianrong shouted, "Here comes our future!"
The future arrived in the form of a portly and balding man who looks like Mao Zedong and promised to revitalize Taotou's economy. Dai Yuehui runs a private coal mine in power-hungry Sichuan province near where the new rail passes. His coal can't compare with Taotou's quality, but until now there's been no way to remove Taotou's coal cheaply. The rail line changed that. Even before its completion, Dai invested nearly $1 million in a new Taotou mine, plus a 14-kilometer access road, and is building a headquarters that will become the tallest building in town. Dai's investment will bring a thousand jobs to an area where most people earn less than a dollar a day; ecstatic local officials will accept the hazards of an industry that claims 5,000 lives a year in accidents in exchange for raising incomes by more than 50% for the area's 30,000 residents.
Most of China's lines to remote areas like Taotou bring nothing but boon, but that's not always the case. The rail project running to Tibet is the country's most dauntless—and controversial. Beijing tried to build a link two decades ago, then surrendered in the face of the Himalayas. The idea itself never died. With the 2008 Olympic Summer Games now spurring high-profile projects to bring glory to China, work began last year on a $2.5 billion line that is "by far the most demanding rail project in history," says Murray Hughes, editor of the London-based Railway Gazette International.
The tracks will cross mountain passes more than 5,000 meters high, just a little below Mount Everest's base camp where climbers have died of altitude sickness. For most of the journey oxygen levels will fall to less than half that at the sea—first-class passengers can attach themselves to tubes in an oxygen bar while everybody else breathes through a special ventilation system similar to that in airplanes. The train will require special diesel locomotives with extra power to operate in the thin air—two for each train. When workers complete the line in 2007 the government plans to run eight trains a day into Lhasa. Already in Lhasa, where single-story Tibetan homes once sprawled below the Potala Palace, the Dalai Lama's former residence, boxy Chinese structures now house Sichuan restaurants, Beijing department stores and, of course, karaoke parlors.
Lhasa will suffer the same kind of influx of people as does Kashgar, a once isolated Silk Road oasis in China's Muslim province of Xinjiang. The first rail line running there, completed in 1999, has brought so many Chinese migrants that Kashgar's traditional Muslim quarters have shrunk into one, tiny section of the city. It's squeezed by broad, new boulevards and Chinese-owned white-tiled buildings that gleam like polished bathroom fixtures. Countless new migrants borne on the rails will similarly complete Lhasa's integration into China, and at the same time give state-run companies access to rich copper deposits high on the plateau. "The rail line lets the government use economic development to politically stabilize the population," says Jane Caple, spokeswoman for the London-based Tibet Information Network.
The politics behind Chinese railway construction runs straight to the highest levels. The country's greatest booster of new rail lines is Premier Zhu Rongji, who has presided over the astonishing build-out from the plains to the shoreline. Next to rundown brick shacks on the eastern side of Shanghai, China's showcase city, peasants who recently arrived from the countryside weave their pedicabs through a trail of concrete pillars two stories tall and past huge wooden boxes stamped "from Europe." Across the top of the pillars unfolds a tongue of metal that will eventually run trains the 30 kilometers to the city's Pudong Airport. This magnetized guideway will soon lift trains 15 centimeters into the air and propel them at 430 km/h—the world's first commercial magnetic levitation line.
And it is Zhu's baby. He rode test lines in Germany and Japan and declared China needed one too. Forced to choose between competing technologies, he found the Japanese unwilling to share their know-how. Moreover, "there's the historic problem with Nanjing," says a senior official from the German consortium that won the billion-dollar bid to build the system; he's referring to the city Japanese troops sacked, raped and pillaged in 1937. Now time is key. Zhu wants the project finished during his tenure, which expires next March. The reason: China plans to build a high-speed link between Shanghai and Beijing and Zhu wants a 500 km/h maglev to do it, cutting the trip between those cities from 14 hours to under three. He faces strong opposition and will fail in his effort if he leaves office before he can point to a maglev success in Shanghai.
More is at stake for Zhu than lashing together China's top two cities. In the next 10 years China will build a high-speed backbone through its eastern provinces, and whatever technology goes into the Beijing-Shanghai run becomes the likeliest candidate for the rest of the system. The Ministry of Railways loathes the idea of crisscrossing the country with magnetized guideways and can tick off pretty good arguments against it: Europe and Japan have had the technology for years and never developed it, traditional high-speed rails can run at 300 km/h far more cheaply, and China might never master more than the simplest maglev technology, forcing it to rely on foreign suppliers (in this case the German companies Siemens, ThyssenKrupp and Transrapid International). But whatever happens, one thing's clear: to the railway falls the task of keeping China's future on track.
—With reporting by Ed Lanfranco/Beijing and Crystyl Mo/Shanghai
|
|
