Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

by Adam Tooze

The gigantic surge in stimulus spending also paid for what is perhaps the most spectacular infrastructure project of the last generation anywhere in the world, the construction of China’s high-speed rail network (HSR). In the first phase of Chinese growth, priority had been given to motorization and highway construction. Now rail came to the fore. After “borrowing” technology from the pioneers of HSR—Japan, Germany and France—China embarked on a program that dwarfed all previous efforts. Between 2008 and 2014 the network of rail lines suitable for traffic at speeds of 250 kilometers per hour or more was expanded from 1,000 kilometers to 11,000 kilometers. Journey times from Beijing to Shanghai were cut to 4.5 hours for an 819-mile trip, compared with the 7 hours that the Acela—the pride of America’s Amtrak—takes to cover the 454 miles from Boston to Washington, DC. Not only did China pioneer ultrafast trains capable of cruising at 360 kilometers per hour. The economies of scale opened up by the gigantic construction program also made China into the technological leader in rail-line and viaduct construction.19 Gigantic snail-like machines would lay the track in a continuous length, mile after mile, across endless arrays of standardized, prefabricated concrete pillars. According to World Bank estimates, even allowing for lower labor and land costs, China’s costs of construction were a fraction of those in Europe and North America.

Amazing