HONG KONG—Southern China was slammed by severe snowstorms resulting in blackouts which seriously affected railway transportation for millions of people planning to travel for Chinese New Year.
The Jing-Guang (Beijing-Guangzhou) Railway, one of the major railways connecting North and South China, was nearly paralyzed by the storm.
Some experts and reporters have noted that this situation exposes insufficiencies and inefficiency in China's infrastructure, particularly for transport and the electric power system.
It has also shown that its capacity to handle a crisis is very fragile; Chinese authorities need to consider this situation seriously.
Railways Falls Behind Highways and Civil Aviation
According to a recent article written by Deng Liwen, a researcher at the Central Party School in Beijing, currently the biggest problem facing China's rail transit system is not only its inability to meet the demands of social and economic development, but also that it is falling behind the air and road transit systems.
As of 2006, China had less than 80,000 kilometers of railway, only six percent of the world's total railway length. This is an average railway length of about six centimeters per person in terms of China's 1.3 billion people, while its railway network carries 24 percent of the world's rail freight traffic.
The article says the current paralysis of railway networks during the Lunar New Year festival is directly caused by over 100 trains being out of service due to harsh weather. Perhaps if there were more north-south railway systems, travelers might not be left stranded in the chilly rain and snow.
Hu Xingdou, an expert in the difficulties facing China, at the Beijing Institute of Technology, said during an interview with VOA, "Sun Yat-Sen once said, 'China will have 100,000 kilometers of railway.' But to this day, we have yet to reach a goal set nearly a hundred years ago. That's why the existing railway systems bear the heavy pressure from passenger transportation during the New Year holiday—there are too many people traveling for the size of our operational railways."
Migrant Workers Rely on Railway Transit to Travel Home
Ai Xiaoming, a professor at Sun Yat-Sen University, who has been conducting a study on migrant workers, noted there are as many as 30 million migrant workers in Zhujiang Delta, located in the coastal region of South China.
Ai said, "We have observed each year as these migrant workers return home they encounter traffic congestion. After so much hard work, they're still experiencing countless difficulties while traveling. There are always accidents and deaths on the trains. For these workers, they simply cannot afford to buy airline tickets."
On the one hand, the passenger throughput volume on roads and railways is massive. On the other hand, the transportation capacity of the country's railway systems is lagging far behind the demand. Some experts say the cause is a capital shortage of construction funding for the implementation of the country's ambitious railway development plan due to monopolization of the industry.
In China's 11th Five Year plan, 17,000 kilometers of new railways are to be constructed with a total investment of 1.25 trillion yuan (US$174 billion). The China Railway Ministry and the state-owned China Development Bank have been making only half the investment, putting the rest of the burden on society.
China's Railway Is a Highly Monopolized Industry
In 2005 the Ministry of Railways (MOR) announced a package of railway investment projects with the newly promulgated regulations for attracting and applying the funds from the capital market.
The regulations allow non-public (privately-owned companies and joint ventures between private foreign companies and state-owned companies) capital to be invested in certain major areas of the railway industry, including railway construction and passenger and freight transport.
However, most domestic and foreign investors have yet to respond. Hu Xingdou thinks this is caused by heavy monopolization of China's railway industry.
Hu said, "The railway industry is a heavily monopolized system. The MOR is technically an administrative body, but in actuality it's an enterprise. It carries on centralized and unionized calculation to the funds of all projects. Each local railway administration and station, to a large degree, doesn't stress economic efficiency, real quality or actual cost.
Such a system without regard for practical results will certainly bring losses to any foreign or private investors because they will be brought into and subordinated to this standardized and unified accounting system. They will eventually lose their autonomy."
Hong Kong media and public opinion have pointed out that when the inland authorities encounter heightened demand from passengers and freights, they launch a political-style campaign to get the public to handle the situation through a centralized logistical approach. This may be a temporary solution to the crisis, but the cost and expense is extremely high.
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