The Economist with a major article — not all totally complimentary — on the galloping pace of building and expansion in China.

Some examples of growth.

Beijing’s new airport terminal, seen here during construction, was designed by the British firm Foster + Partners, and planned and built in four years by an army of 50,000 workers.

The terminal is 3km (1.8 miles) long. The floor space is 17% bigger than all the terminals at London’s Heathrow combined (including about-to-open Terminal Five). Part of a $3.8 billion expansion, which included the opening of a third runway in October, it is due to open at the end of this month, weeks ahead of schedule.

It is the ninth busiest airport in the world.

And it is part of the rush to improve China’s logistics infrastructure.

Between 2001 and the end of 2005 more was spent on roads, railways and other fixed assets than was spent in the previous 50 years. According to the state media, investment will see double-digit growth every year for the rest of the decade.

The world’s longest sea-crossing bridge is due to open in June: a 36km six-lane highway across Hangzhou Bay.
Shanghai is home to the current world-record holder for such a structure, the 32km Donghai bridge. This was opened less than three years ago to link the city with Yangshan port.
Yangshan is intended to be one of the world’s biggest deep-water facilities when completed at some point after 2010.
From August the 115km journey from Beijing to Tianjin, its nearest port, will be reduced to half an hour with the inauguration of a bullet-train link
Work began in January on a 1,300km line between Beijing and Shanghai which will be completed in five years’ time.
The world’s highest railway from Golmud to the Tibetan capital, Lhasa was completed in 2006.
Since the 1990s China has built an expressway network criss-crossing the country that is second only to America’s interstate highway system in length. By the end of 2007, some 53,600km of toll expressways had been built. The aim is to have 70,000km of expressways by 2020.
The World Bank says that China’s railways carry 25% of the world’s railway traffic on just 6% of its track length. In the past couple of years investment has grown considerably. This year’s target is $42 billion, compared with a total of $72 billion in the preceding five years.
The increase in air passenger traffic has been dramatic: from 7 million passengers in 1985 to over 185 million in 2007.
Source: The Economist

China Railway Group raised RMB22.44 billion (US$3 billion) after attracting a record subscription for a mainland initial public offering. The Beijing-based construction contractor is expected to benefit from China’s rapid expansion in railway, and other transport infrastructure such as roads and bridges. The government has said China plans to spend RMB1.25 trillion in railway construction during the five years through 2010.

A Guodu Securities Co report said, ‘China Railway has very few competitors in its industry domestically. It has absolute advantage in winning contracts for those large projects which could net higher profit margins.’

China Railway’s IPO price is 26.7 times its estimated 2007 earnings, based on domestic accounting standards.

China Railway is the world’s third largest construction firm and Asia’s largest. The firm’s other revenue sources include engineering equipment manufacture, construction design and consulting, real estate development and mining.
It work in some very difficult places.

Our illustration shows a worker from China Railway at a construction site of the Jalalabad-Sarobi road, suburb of the eastern Afghan city Jalalabad. Armed guards were needed.
Source: Shanghai Daily

Construction has started on Tibet’s biggest logistics center. It is, of course, the direct result of the Qinghai-Tibet Railway that opened a year ago. We have made the illustration a little larger than normal so that you can see they are installing the station name.

The logistics center, covering 533 hectares, is next to a railway station in Nagqu Township of Nagqu County in northern Tibet.

According to Hao Peng, executive vice chairman of the Tibet Autonomous Region, it should be up and running with 15 months and will cost RMB1.5 billion ($200 million). The center is expected to handle 2.23 million tons of cargo by 2015 and 3.1 million by 2020.

Lu Chunfang, vice minister of railways said, ‘The northern part of Tibet is rich in natural resources, and the Nagqu logistics center will provide easier access to the resources, which will drive the industrial development and trade in the area and raise its self-development capabilities.’

So what do the locals think? Xinhua, the news service, asked Dunzhu, a local herder. She said she supported the idea. She said, ‘To me, it means that I have access to more commodity goods my family needs, and easier ways to sell our dairy goods.’

According to the Tibet Regional Statistics BureauTibet’s gross domestic product (GDP) posted a 14.7% growth to reach RMB14 billion ($1.84 billion) in the first half of this year.
Source: People’ Daily Online

Interesting that a pattern that exists in Europe is being repeated in China. That is competition between rail and air travel.

Leave pricing out of the equation for a moment. With rail the station is typically in the center of town, you can arrive 15 minutes before departure, there are minimal if any security checks and you arrive at the center of your destination. Another plus point for some is the ability to easily move around which is not always there with air travel. And you are rarely delayed by weather. Our illustration is not the cabin on an aircraft. It is the inside of a train.

On the other hand, depending on the distance, air can be a lot faster.

So now the two are trying to introduce new attractions.

For example, the Ministry of Railways said recently that high-quality mineral water, produced in the Tibet Autonomous Region, will be provided free to all passengers on long-distance bullet trains this month.

The water, which comes in in 330 ml bottles, retails for about RMB6 (79 cents), much more than regular brands.

An official with the news office of the Shanghai railway bureau said that when it comes to service, attendants on bullet trains are trained to the same standards as hotel staff. In addition, the catering providers were chosen through public bidding and are as good as those operating on airlines although, in truth, that would not be seen by everyone as a recommendation.

Price comes in to it. The journey between Shanghai and Beijing takes 10 hours on the bullet train and tickets are priced at RMB327 and 409, less than half the cost of an air ticket between the two cities.

But five domestic airlines had joined forces to offer the Beijing-Shanghai Express Flight service which promises flights between the two cities every 30 minutes and passengers can use a single ticket on any of the five participating airlines.

Travel experts have said the new promotions and services are a clear indication of the ‘accelerating’ competition between rail and air travel providers.

Wu Wenhua, a researcher with the National Development and Reform Commission’s comprehensive transport institute said, ‘Traditionally, air travel has had the upper hand when it comes to long-distance travel — 1,000 km or more — such as between Beijing and Shanghai. But the Beijing-Shanghai route has such a huge passenger flow that neither rail nor air travel operators can afford to take their eye of the ball in the battle for market share.’

CAAC figures show that 4.18 million passengers flew between Beijing and Shanghai Hongqiao Airport in 2006, equivalent to about 11,000 per day.

The Ministry of Railways declined to provide its passenger numbers for the route.
Source: China Daily

A total no-brainer. If you need to sell product from Tibet start with mineral water obtained from the least polluted glaciers in the world.

The first batch of 88,000 cargoes of mineral water collected from alpine glaciers in Tibet has left Nagqu by train. The water will not only be available in the market in other provinces and autonomous regions of China, but will also be supplied for free to the passengers on the trains on the Qinghai-Tibet Railway from August 1.

However, in is a matter of minor conjecture how long it will be before the world is offered Tibetan mineral water which will be embued with — suppressio veri, suggestio falsi — with magical powers.

You jog? Drink Tibetan mineral water and you will jog further, faster and possibly enter a higher plane of existence. Not guaranteed mark you. But at only $9.50 a bottle (we are just guessing at a possible price) it should be seen as a bargain.

In fact, many local products from Tibet are now available in other parts of China since the opening of the Qinghai-Tibet Railway. The railway has served as an important booster to Tibet’s economy.
Source: China News.cn

Beijing West Railway Station, the capital’s largest station, is expecting a record turnover in passenger flows in July and August. This has nothing to do with Golden Weeks — and we may have seen the last of those — it is about people traveling in the summer.

An official estimated 7.55 million departures from the station in the two peak summer months with a daily average of 122,000 passengers. That is up 12.8% from the same period last year.

To deal with this the station will arrange one extra inbound and outbound service each on nine routes, bringing the total number of services each day to 121 each inbound and outbound.

This is a holiday station with many of the trains stopping at tourist destinations in China’s
central and western regions. The station had arranged special trains destined for former revolutionary bases such as Yan’an, Jinggangshan, Nanchang and Zunyi.

China’s railway authorities raised the maximum train speed for the sixth time on April 18 and 286 trains now run at up to 250 kilometers per hour every day. As a result, more tourists are taking the train to popular destinations such as Chengdu, Chongqing, Kunming, Guilin and Urumqi.

China’s trains carried a quarter of the world’s total passenger and freight rail transport last year, but the country has just 6% of the world’s operational track.

Source: People’s Daily Online

Foreign media reported that over ten serious incidents concerning the Qinghai-Tibet Railway were covered up. Not so, according to an official from the Qinghai-Tibet Railway Company.

Vice General Manager Zhu Huaxin said, ‘Over the past year, the railway has always put safety, punctuality and passenger comfort front and center given the extreme plateau conditions.’

The railway crosses over 550-km of frozen tundra on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. Combined with being the highest railway in the world and the prolonged periods in inhospitable surroundings. As a result safety has been a major priority for the railway’s staff.

The plateau’s permafrost created a specific set of threats to track stability, explained Zhu Huaxin and experts had established measures that prevented the soil from thawing and being unstable.

Certain roadbeds had cracked, along with a few concrete structures and bridges, in August last year, but that these had been swiftly repaired by the Ministry of Railways.

Zhu Huaxin said, ‘The roadbeds in this section are gradually becoming stable, and the soil has withstood the test of both summer and winter.’

The Golmud-Lhasa and the Xining-Golmud sections have performed excellently, achieving a service reliability ratio of 99.6% and 92.1%, respectively.

Zhu Huaxin said, ‘There was only one restaurant car derailment, but it was an equipment problem and was handled properly.’ He said it was the only incident. The railway has now been running for almost exactly one year.
Source: China.org.cn

Tourists have been flocking to Tibet this year, according to government statistics, recording 2.25 million visitors to the region in the last ten months and US$300 million in tourism revenue. The influx is mainly due to the Qinghai-Tibet Railway which started services in July, linking Lhasa to major cities across China.

“Although winter is usually an off-season for tourism here, the number of tourists has been growing to some extent compared with the same period of last year.”
Spokesman from the regional Tourism Bureau

By the end of November visitor numbers are expected to rise to 2.35 million.
Source: TravelVideo.TV