In 1988, Paul Theroux, the sharply observant, acerbic travel writer, published one of his most widely read books, titled Riding the Iron Rooster, in which he devoted almost 500 pages to detailing a year of traveling extensively by rail in China.

The author claimed the title was derived from a colloquial Chinese name for the rail service to far-western Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region. This was questionable. The New York Times Book Review concluded that the book was “an opinionated, petty and incomplete portrait” of China.

Whatever one might think of the tilted nature of this work, Theroux still wrote vividly and knowledgeably. What the book makes clear is that 40 years ago, China’s rail system was already vast, fundamentally important and always hugely busy. The total track length at that time, according to China’s National Bureau of Statistics, was already substantial at 55,800 kilometers.

By 2030, total track length in China is expected to exceed 180,000 km. This includes an anticipated high-speed rail (HSR) network of 60,000 km with trains running at speeds of 300 kilometers per hour or faster. This HSR figure alone exceeds the total rail length in China in the mid-1980s. More on this network expansion, shortly. Before that, however, it is useful to look at the extraordinary, fundamental role China played in bringing transcontinental rail travel to North America.

When the United States built its first transcontinental railroad in the 1860s, during and immediately after that country’s civil war, the Central Pacific Railroad, which was building from the west, faced a critical manpower shortage. After seeing the excellent work completed by a small crew of Chinese workers recruited from the Californian goldfields, the company subsequently recruited around 12,000 new workers from Guangdong province, and they proved vital in completing this first-ever, cross-country link (see, US’ ‘China Initiative’ would be counterproductive, China Daily Hong Kong Edition, Feb 7).

Less than 20 years later, Canada recruited some 17,000 workers from Guangdong to work on the most treacherous (Rocky Mountains) section of Canada’s first transcontinental railway — which was finished in 1885. In both cases, no Chinese were invited to the “final spike” ceremonies. In both cases, Chinese workers subsequently had to endure a lonely, racially shunned, impoverished existence, where they were regularly harassed, often attacked and sometimes lynched.

Neither of these remarkable, pioneering railroads could have been completed as they were without this crucial Chinese input. In both cases, no Chinese were invited to the “final spike” ceremonies.

These episodes remind us of how, even during its century of humiliation, China pivotally (but thanklessly) helped the US and Canada build their modern new societies in North America. They also highlight what a colossal, positive change we have seen develop since then and especially over the last 40-plus years.

China’s first HSR line opened in 2008, less than 20 years ago. Total HSR track length presently exceeds 48,000 km, and the network is now penetrating mountainous areas once thought unreachable by HSR. This remarkable, still-expanding system currently accounts for around two-thirds of all HSR networks worldwide.

As it happens, the US in 2008 also began building its first HSR link, the first phase of which is an 800-km line in California. It is meant to connect Los Angeles and San Francisco. The initial, central segment of less than 300 km is still not set to open until well after 2030. The cost is already huge, however. In the meantime, Brightline trains running in Florida, from Miami to Orlando, operate at speeds of up to 200 km/h, but this line is also the deadliest by kilometer in the US, recording over 120 deaths of pedestrians and automobile drivers since 2018. 

China has also been building city-based metro rail systems at a comparably stunning rate. By 2024, China had built metro systems in 54 cities, covering over 10,000 km, eclipsing the total length of the next eight largest metro networks worldwide, including those in the US, UK, Japan and Russia. Four of the top 10 metro networks worldwide are now in China. I distinctly recall visiting Guangzhou 30 years ago and noting that the very latest public transport innovation then was the introduction of “hot dog” (no air conditioning) secondhand buses from Hong Kong.

Unsurprisingly, backed up by this incomparable wealth of local experience, China is steadily building rail infrastructure around the world, while Chinese locomotives and rolling stock are being delivered to more and more countries.

Thus, new HSR lines have been built: connecting Laos with China, and in Indonesia and Turkiye. Meanwhile, regular rail (and metro) developments have been rolled out in Greece, Hungary and Serbia in Europe as well as in a range of countries in Africa, the Middle East and Latin America, including Angola, Chile, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, Saudi Arabia and Tanzania.

Closer to home, construction of the new China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan railway is set to commence this year. This long-planned, ambitious project, which will require extensive tunneling in mountainous areas, will provide a fresh link from Kashgar in Xinjiang to Central Asia.

In fact, China has already pioneered the operation of Eurasian rail-freight transportation, connecting China to Europe, via Mongolia and Russia and via Kazakhstan. Today, around 19,000 freight train journeys occur each year with over 100,000 journeys made since this service began in the 2010s. The cost is highly competitive, and the journey time is less than a third of that for sea freight.

As it happens, Australia has been talking for many years about building an HSR connection from Melbourne to Brisbane via Canberra and Sydney. This discussion has gone on for so long that it finally gave rise to a widely watched episode, titled Very Fast Turnover, of the satirical TV series Utopia, which raises the question: Is an HSR possible in Australia? The program delivered a firmly negative answer. Though it did come up with a name for this much discussed, imaginary train: The Silver Emu.

In fact, the best way for Australia and the US (and like-minded allies) to benefit from the construction of new HSR lines would be to consult and engage with China. Alas, much of the Global West remains willfully alienated from Beijing due to inhaling its own continuous, polarizing media promotion of the “China threat”.

Fortunately, the rest of the world is not so foolishly self-shackled in its thinking and planning. It knows that China is now simply the premier global railroad builder. It can see that when the world thinks of railways today, it thinks of China in the same way that, when it thinks of air travel, it thinks of Airbus and Boeing.

The author is an adjunct professor in the Faculty of Law, the University of Hong Kong.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.