Transformations of China (3):

Land Transportation Infrastructure

Dr. C. C. Lin

Biotechnology Consultant

27 Sept 2010

I was born in mainland China, grew up in Hong Kong where I had my primary and secondary education before moving to the US for higher education as well as my subsequent professional career. I can vividly recall that, during my secondary school days, it took me more than an hour from my home at the present Kowloon Bay area to my secondary school at Prince Edward Road. My travel time then included long waiting in line for the bus and relatively slow moving bus with many stops to Prince Edward Road. It practically took me about three hours of round trip travel every school day.

Those were the days I carried small note cards in my pocket in order to utilize my travel time to study during the most competitive period of the Hong Kong education system when extremely few students were admitted to the University of Hong Kong through the matriculation examination. Eventually, like many Hong Kong students then, I had decided to go to the US for my undergraduate and subsequently postgraduate education during the political turmoil period of the “Cultural Revolution” in mainland China which, as many of you know very well, also affected Hong Kong.

When I took my first return trip through Hong Kong to mainland China in 1985 after a long absence, I was very impressed that the initial section of the Mass Transit Railway (MTR) system was operating which indeed made travel much faster through the mostly underground subway system. However, it was quite a different story when I took the Kowloon-Guangzhou through train to Guangzhou in the evening. After the train slowly crossed the Lo Wu Bridge into the mainland, I noticed that the Hong Kong side was well lighted but the mainland side was quite dark as a result of shortage of electricity supply those not so good old days. It took the through train more than four hours to go from Hung Hom to Guangzhou Train Station then. The train was traveling at relatively slow speed inside the mainland.

During that August 1985 trip, we had to take a business trip from Beijing to Lianyungang (連雲港), the northern coastal port of Jiangsu Province (江蘇省). There was only one flight each week between Beijing and Lianyungang and we just missed it. The only alternative was to take the so called “fast” rain (by the 1985 definition in China) from Beijing to Xuzhou (徐州) an important railway center in the northern Jiangsu Province.

We got the best train tickets (by 1985 standard) in a soft sleeper cabin. There was no air conditioning in the entire train. It was very hot and humid time and the only fan in the 4-bed cabin was grossly inadequate to cool us down which made us very uncomfortable. It took a long 24 hours for that torturous train to reach Xuzhou with many stops. At the Xuzhou Train Station, our business host sent two vans to pick us up and drove us from Xuzhou to Lianyungang where just about half of that trip was paved roads. We drove through unpaved village roads for about half of the trip during which we blew the tires twice. It was a very scarily and bumpy road trip which took a total of eight long hours to drive about 120 kilometers.

To date, China has the fastest (average about 350 km/hour) and very comfortable air conditioned train services in the world. The railway networks are very well established. At this time, China is still building many high speed railways with the target to connect most the major cities with train services within 4 hours of fast train travel time. China also built vast networks of well paved highways for automobiles which made land travel in mainland China much more efficient and comfortable with many new projects to continue to improve land transportations.

In 1985, the roads in Beijing had many bicycles and not many automobiles. These days, the roads in Beijing are jammed with many automobiles during rush hours causing traffic congestion problem which they are still striving to resolve.

-- To Be Continued --