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Rail & Infrastructure

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A well trained country

In the decade that WiC has published, bullet trains have transformed China
Feb 8, 2019 (WiC 440)

It was almost exactly 10 years ago – on February 6 2009 – that WiC published its first Talking Point in our first issue. The focus was trains and what we described as the dawn of a revolution in high-speed rail. In that article we made our ...

Xi Jinping visits Guangdong in the latest ‘Southern Tour’
Oct 26, 2018 (WiC 429)

The year 1992 was a difficult one in China. Economic growth had slowed for three consecutive years and Deng Xiaoping’s reforms were being stymied by conservative forces who argued that the country was moving too fast and too far from the ...

Not the end of the road

A comeback for the tycoon who first imagined the ‘Greater Bay Area’
Oct 5, 2018 (WiC 427)

Jardine House was Hong Kong’s tallest building until 1980 when it was surpassed by the Hopewell Centre in Wanchai. Xu Jiatun, head of the Hong Kong branch of Chinese news agency Xinhua – a role which in that era made him the country’s ...

The missing link

A new high-speed railway line to mainland China has opened in Hong Kong
Sep 28, 2018 (WiC 426)

In the nineteenth century the railway industry was a symbol of Britain’s industrial might. For the Chinese it was another indicator of the nation’s humiliation and the limits of its sovereign power. The first commercial railroad in China ...

Beware railway shares?

After seven years, the Beijing-Shanghai bullet train could IPO
Jul 27, 2018 (WiC 419)

Passengers do better out of high-speed rail than investors, it seems. The backers of bullet trains argue they pay their way by benefiting the wider economy but few high-speed lines are said to make money on a consistent basis – though ...

Going round in circles

As Beijing completes its Seventh Ring Road, a short history of the other six
Jun 29, 2018 (WiC 415)

If you liked it, then you should have put a ring on it.” So sang Beyonce in her iconic 2008 hit Single Ladies. China’s traffic planners, it seems, need little persuading. This month Beijing will open its seventh orbital highway, ...

Four incidents put China’s trains in the news
Feb 2, 2018 (WiC 396)

This August will mark 10 years since the opening of the Beijing-Tianjin intercity train – China’s first dedicated high-speed rail line. Since then things have moved on at pace. The country has laid more than 25,000 kilometres of high-speed ...

Train cancellations

Construction of subway system halted in Inner Mongolia on debt concerns
Nov 24, 2017 (WiC 389)

A bad reputation can be hard to shake. Despite years of operation almost entirely without incident, China’s high-speed trains are still tainted by a deadly crash in 2011 (see WiC117). Part of the government’s response to that was to reduce ...

Fosun-led consortium inks deal for China’s first private railway line
Sep 22, 2017 (WiC 381)

The first railways in China were financed, engineered and operated by foreigners (see WiC23). They were built during the Qing Dynasty and faced major opposition from members of the imperial court, who saw the train lines as symbols of foreign ...

A Messi situation

Kidnapping claim stirs fears on co-location plan
Aug 18, 2017 (WiC 376)

A 1980s slogan for Britain’s railways urged passengers to shun road journeys and “let the train take the strain”. In contemporary Hong Kong an $11 billion train line is proving more of a source of strain – at least in political ...

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