You're listening to Roundtable.
I'm Niu Honglin, joined by Steve and Yixuan.
Coming up soon, every country builds railways.
China built them through deserts, frozen plains, earthquake zones, plateaus that collapse when they get wet and mountains that refuse straight lines.
Lately, the country passed its 50,000 kilometer network milestone.
Let's take a chance to do a reality check about the past, present and future of China's high speed rail.
As of December 2025, China has officially crossed a breathtaking threshold.
Its high-speed railway network now spans over 50,000 kilometers.
To put that in perspective, this single network could circle the earth with room to spare.
The crowning achievement that pushed the nation past this milestone is the launch of the Xi'an-Yan'an High-Speed Railway.
This is another wing for engineering and, more significantly, it's a symbolic bridge between China's modern technological parallels and its historical roots.
So let's start with this exciting news.
This Xi'an-Yan'an line is opening on December 26th.
This 300 kilometer stretch connecting the provincial capital, Xi'an with Yan'an one serving as a base for the Communist Party of China during wartime and the whole train designed for 350 kilometers per hour, reducing travel time from nearly 25 hours to just about one hour, and that is when the People living in these two areas they can actually.
The line replaces the winding, slower mountain routes with a high efficiency corridor, bringing people into just one hour economic circle.
We have a lot of these. several hour, several minute economic circle or life circle, right?
People can just travel to their destination within that certain amount of time.
And that actually trespasses the lowest plateau, which posed many technological challenges.
Yeah.
I mean, speaking of challenges, just the construction of this line was really, really difficult.
This is Shanxi province, right?
And Xi'an is in It's kind of in the middle of the province, but a little bit south.
And then Yan'an is north, if I'm correct.
Now, the problem with the construction is the Loess Plateau.
And that is an area that is infamous for being very fragile and collapsible in terms of its soil.
And it's got really complex topography.
So that makes the construction really really, really difficult to for the engineers who had to put this together.
They had to get through the mountains.
One of the amazing statistics about this whole thing the network over 90 percent of the line is bridges and tunnels, 90 percent from that area of Xi'an to Yan'an.
It's a it's an it's kind of an incredible feat of engineering to be able to build this, and this is not the first time we have something like this.
My hometown is in Shanxi Province.
And when I travel from Beijing to my home Taiyuan, which is the provincial capital of the province, Shanxi Province, I go through.
I think, if I really think about it, the overall time would be around three hours or two and a half hours.
And the last or the one and a half hour that's closer to Taiyuan instead of to Beijing is is the area with a lot of tunnels, so that I go through the tunnels.
The internet connection was not very well at that time, but it's definitely definitely much faster than when I was a kid that have to travel overnight, entire night, for that journey.
And we see the construction teams utilize many different means to complete the project.
I'm pretty sure this because this is completed within this year.
The construction, not only the construction is using a lot of technology, it's working environment for the construction worker is even better.
Yeah well, I mean the tech that they used to Kind of create this project before they even did the project.
They did it.
They made a digital twin of the railway So they were able to simulate every bolt and every beam Before it was actually built.
And that was really important because they were able to predict how that soil, how that lowest soil, Would react to pressure one of the one of the ways it was described, And I thought this was quite good.
They said that building or drilling through this kind of soil, this kind of dirt, is like drilling through a stale sponge.
And that means that if you make one wrong move then that could lead to very significant surface collapse.
That's how sensitive this soil is.
So that's why building that digital twin and knowing exactly what to expect before they started construction was really important to the success of.
It's like first start with a computer game, a video game of designing everything and see what would go right and wrong and then start real construction.
Yeah, then they also apply these advanced tunneling shields for the complex tunnel sections.
Crews used these specialized shield machines and pipe roofing methods to create a protective shell before excavation and then preventing the collapsible loas from shifting.
And in fact, there are multiple new lines opening just this month or this year.
We see that, while the Xi'an-Yan'an line takes center stage, the southern and eastern coasts are seeing equally vital additions in the late 2025.
Wuhan Yicheng section, a new kind of a new golden corridor for the Yangtze River economic belt, that's at the like center and the south part of China.
The Wuhan Yichang section stretches 314 kilometers and is designed for a top speed also 350 kilometers per hour, and it enables people in Hubei to travel most Major cities nationwide by roughly three to four hours.
That is, I think, brings a lot of convenience for people living in there when they can actually having another comfortable and speedy transportation in their daily life.
Yeah, it's kind of a convenient part of the country to live in if you can get to every major city within, or most major cities within three to four hours.
Oh, yes.
In China now actually, for all the major cities with a population over 500 000 people, 97 of the cities that we mentioned are connected with the country's high speed rail and also with the kind of city clusters.
You should mention that the kind of life circle one hour life circle, one to two hours life circle as long as the city's clusters are with a distance of 500 kilometers, they have this one to two hours living circle.
And it is a.
It is a process that, at the very beginning, we see the country building the kind of railways, high speed railroads between or among the mega cities, making sure that the country, from a nationwide perspective, is connected faster and more together.
But later on, in the past five years, I say my feeling is that the construction of it is relatively slowing down in the sense that we're moving from major cities getting together to making sure the convenience of the development of the city clusters, of the regional development being powered and being facilitated.
For example, we see that in 2008, we see the opening of the Beijing-Tianjin Intercity Railway.
That was quite significant because it's China's first high-speed railway.
And it is designed for a top speed of 350.
That's kilometers per hour.
That's pretty fast.
That trip from Beijing to Tianjin, you get on the back of the train.
If you walk to the front of the train, you will be in Tianjin.
Oh, did you actually do that?
No, i didn't.
I sat in the chair.
But it's 20, it's 25 minutes.
It's unbelievable and it kind of made.
I've kind of walked around the streets of beijing and when i've been up high in a building i've kind of looked around to see if i could see tianjin, because i thought it must be super close.
But it's actually not that close.
It's just that the train goes 350 kilometers an hour for a good 20-25 minutes.
That's why you get there so quickly.
That's the time i calculate how close these cities are.
You know like probably, like 20 minutes is the like, the calculation that you can see.
They're just close enough, because when i was in university i traveled to sujo and i live in wuxi and these cities are also very close and you can take also 20 minutes to travel one city to another.
And but when you're like Driving a car,
Yeah, it's obviously much longer.
It can take you like two hours for that.
Or more if the traffic's bad, and some other milestones include the beijing shanghai high-speed railway and then the harbing dalian high-speed railway, and also in 2017, we see the launch of the chinese standard fuxing on the beijing shanghai line.
It's also quite significant.
It's not only about the railways, but also the rail trains out there.
And one thing very interesting is that if you take a closer look at the the pace of the construction from 2013 or in the year 2013, we see the collective mileage exceeded 10000 kilometers and the Teal 2021 is 4000 kilometers.
And now, It's kind of like every two or three years we see the addition of over 10,000 kilometers.
But since 2021 to 2025, it's turning from 40,000 to 50,000 that we're talking about.
So, yes, it is slowing down because it needs a better plan.
And it's developed to a stage that it is no longer the kind of emergency and urgent situation need to construct more railways.
It's a better plan.
You see, for example, in Shanghai there is a railroad, real high speed railroad, from Shanghai to Shanghai, Hongqiao.
It's making sure that these kind of constructions are not only there for the sake of increasing numbers, to impress people, but to really help lift or improve the lively standards of people.
Yeah, it's not about just having it.
It's about having it perform really, really well.
There was another big development in terms of rail this year, and that was also in December, as a matter of fact.
It was in the Great Bay Area down south.
They have a new line speed of 400 kilometers an hour.
That's even faster than the 350s that we're used to.
But now it means that you can reach any city in Guangdong in an hour and a half.
So I was just celebrating the people in Hubei.
And Guangdong is like, yeah, we'll take this.
Thank you very much.
One more point.
Sorry to interrupt, but I think this is a really exciting one.
This is actually one of my favorite stories of the year that I did on Roundtable.
It was about the maglev prototypes in the trains, like what's coming next.
And they're successfully testing trains maglev trains that could push close to a thousand kilometers an hour.
I don't know when we're going to see that, but when we were talking about that episode, or when we were talking about this issue, on that episode, we were talking about the potential in real competition with domestic flights, because you're talking about trains that can travel at the same speeds.
That would shorten times between cities to an almost unbelievable amount.
If we get there, the train from Shanghai to Beijing and back again, it's about four and a half hours each way, right?
This would shorten that trip to 90 minutes.
You could live in Beijing and work in Shanghai.
My next sentence, exactly.
Because I've already seen on my short video platform I watch too many short videos that some people are already.
They're living in Beijing and working in Taiwan.
I thought it would be vice versa, but it's already quite, quite convenient.
And yes, sometimes we think speed only means that we are spending less time on the traffic.
But it's more than that.
It means cities can actually plan their future together because people can move more freely in these different cities and city clusters.
It also means that for a city that used to not being very significant or famous or very, let's say, important to that region because of its geological position and because of the development of the transportation system, it can be all of a sudden become a hub of the entire area and allowing people to choose it for travel or for major international meetings or conferences, just because of its conveniency.
So yes, it's about number for today's show, but it's more, much, much more than just numbers.
It's definitely changing lives.
And with the changing of environment, we are looking at many, many more possible opportunities in roundtable is always here to observe.
And that brings us to the end of today's show.
We'd love to hear your thoughts on today's topics.
Leave us a comment wherever you listen to your podcast, or send us an email to roundtablepodcast at qqcom.
Until next time, keep the conversations going and the ideas flowing.
I'm Niu Honglin with Yu Shen and Steve.
Thank you for listening.
Bye.
