A leading railway technology researcher on Friday said most Chinese experts do not favor the use of magnetic levitation technology, or maglev, for a planned high-speed link between Beijing and Shanghai.
"Most of the experts consider it is rational to stick to conventional railway technology [for the Beijing-Shanghai line]," Wang Derong (
A maglev line would be too expensive and too hard to integrate with conventional lines, said Wang, a retired railway engineer who has researched technology for the proposed Beijing-Shanghai line for the past 10 years.
PHOTO: AP
A conventional line would cost only about half as much as a maglev one, he said.
Wang's comments follow a China Daily report saying China has abandoned plans to build a high-speed magnetic-levitation railway between Beijing and Shanghai.
The reports say that China has decided to build less expensive conventional trains instead.
A maglev system can cost up to 300 to 400 million yuan (US$36 to US$48 million) per km, twice that of wheel-track lines, the paper said.
The paper, citing unidentified sources, said Premier Wen Jiabao (
The Railways Ministry had no immediate public comment on the matter. At least one newspaper, the Beijing Morning Post, said the decision to abandon the maglev plan had not been finalized.
The scrapping of the nine-year-old maglev notion -- two weeks after the country's first maglev, a short stretch in Shanghai, began regular operation -- represents a setback for the development of maglev technology in China, which many had seen as one of maglev's key markets.
It also appears to open the market for alternatives on the proposed Beijing-Shanghai line.
Other options for the railway, according to state media, include styling it after the Shinkansen, Japan's high-speed bullet train, or two methods used in France -- TGV and Inter-City Express. The Shanghai maglev is German-built.
German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said Friday he still believes there are chances for the German Transrapid consortium in China, despite the reports that China will not use the group's maglev technology for the Beijing-Shanghai line.
In comments aired on German, Schroeder said he believed "that the train which functions well ... will have its chances" in China.
China began daily runs of the world's first commercially operated maglev in Shanghai on Jan. 1, but the US$1.2 billion German-built system spans only 30 km. It connects Shanghai to its 3-year-old airport, the city's second.
SEMICONDUCTOR SERVICES: A company executive said that Taiwanese firms must think about how to participate in global supply chains and lift their competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it expects to launch its first multifunctional service center in Pingtung County in the middle of 2027, in a bid to foster a resilient high-tech facility construction ecosystem. TSMC broached the idea of creating a center two or three years ago when it started building new manufacturing capacity in the US and Japan, the company said. The center, dubbed an “ecosystem park,” would assist local manufacturing facility construction partners to upgrade their capabilities and secure more deals from other global chipmakers such as Intel Corp, Micron Technology Inc and Infineon Technologies AG, TSMC said. It
People walk past advertising for a Syensqo chip at the Semicon Taiwan exhibition in Taipei yesterday.
NO BREAKTHROUGH? More substantial ‘deliverables,’ such as tariff reductions, would likely be saved for a meeting between Trump and Xi later this year, a trade expert said China launched two probes targeting the US semiconductor sector on Saturday ahead of talks between the two nations in Spain this week on trade, national security and the ownership of social media platform TikTok. China’s Ministry of Commerce announced an anti-dumping investigation into certain analog integrated circuits (ICs) imported from the US. The investigation is to target some commodity interface ICs and gate driver ICs, which are commonly made by US companies such as Texas Instruments Inc and ON Semiconductor Corp. The ministry also announced an anti-discrimination probe into US measures against China’s chip sector. US measures such as export curbs and tariffs
The US on Friday penalized two Chinese firms that acquired US chipmaking equipment for China’s top chipmaker, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯國際), including them among 32 entities that were added to the US Department of Commerce’s restricted trade list, a US government posting showed. Twenty-three of the 32 are in China. GMC Semiconductor Technology (Wuxi) Co (吉姆西半導體科技) and Jicun Semiconductor Technology (Shanghai) Co (吉存半導體科技) were placed on the list, formally known as the Entity List, for acquiring equipment for SMIC Northern Integrated Circuit Manufacturing (Beijing) Corp (中芯北方積體電路) and Semiconductor Manufacturing International (Beijing) Corp (中芯北京), the US Federal Register posting said. The
RSS