China has chosen the Lunar New Year holidays, when 70 million people will travel by rail, to showcase its first high speed trains, but pains are being taken to downplay the fact that they were made abroad.
With great fanfare, the railways ministry announced that 15 bullet trains had been put into service for the busy holiday season, when the rail network is stretched to the limit.
The 40-day travel period began on Feb. 3 ahead of the official start to the Lunar New Year tomorrow, a time that centuries of Chinese tradition dictates should be spent with families.
PHOTO: AFP
To carry the returning relatives, the "CRH" (China Railway High-Speed) trains are now running on some of the nation's key routes -- including from Beijing to Shanghai, and Shanghai to Guangzhou.
Although they are now only chugging along at 160kph as they go through a trial period, from April 18 they will be able to start hitting their top speeds of 250kph.
The fastest travel time from Shanghai to the Beijing will then be cut to five hours from nine.
"The main goal of the commercial launch of these trains is to increase passenger capacity during the New Year vacation period and also to gain experience for the official launch," ministry spokesman Liang Chenggu said.
By 2020, the bullet trains will steam along 130,000km of track -- just over a third of the nation's rail network.
Amid the hype surrounding the new trains, authorities have not been shy about singing the praises of what they call a homegrown technological success.
The Asian giant, the world's fourth-largest economy, is keen to show off the new bullet trains as evidence that it can develop its own technology in key sectors, and is not simply the world's workshop.
"China has now mastered the basic technology needed for operating trains at more than 200 kilometres an hour," Liang said.
"The CRH shows that the Chinese rail industry ... has entered the new high-speed age," he added, emphasizing the ministry "owns the intellectual property rights" to the engineering know-how.
But the trains were largely built abroad on the basis of technology transfer agreements with global industry heavy-hitters such as Japan's Mitsubishi-Kawasaki, Canada's Bombardier, German giant Siemens and France's Alstom.
The first Alstom train, a model made in Italy, is set to hit the Chinese tracks from mid-April.
The head of Alstom's operations in China, Alain Berger, said its first CRH train to arrive in Changchun "will likely be decked out in China's national colors, and we'll say it was `made in China.'"
"That's not exactly true. But the subsequent trains will be put together in China, little by little," he said.
"Everyone knows -- the media and experts alike -- that these trains were made with foreign technology. Emblazoning the trains with the CRH logo is a matter of ego. It's not a big deal," he said.
Alstom will eventually deliver a total of 60 trains to China in a contract worth 620 million euros (US$810 million).
One Western industry expert who asked not to be named said the key issue for the future would be to monitor the changing relationship between China and the key players in the sector.
"We've never seen technology transfers of this scope. We don't know how this will develop and how the foreign firms will continue to play the game," the source said.
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