Back in 2009 when I was working in Beijing, I once planned to go to Nanjing – which is a city around 900 kilometers away – to visit my parents at a national holiday. It took me over a day to get a ticket because everyone was planning their holidays. But that was not the most painful experience. I later on found out that the train was filled with people, and I had to spend 10 hours standing in the same place during that unforgettable trip. 

Six years later when I was accompanying my mother to her surgery in Nanjing, our company’s Beijing office asked me to attend a face-to-face meeting. It took me a few minutes to buy the train ticket on-line, and a bit more than 3 hours to travel, comfortably sat. Later in that afternoon when the meeting was finished, I found I still had enough time to catch the afternoon train. So I successfully reached my home in Nanjing at around 8 pm that night. 

This tremendous change of the way of travelling happened because of the completion of Shanghai-Beijing high speed train, which runs at 350 kilometers per hour and works as punctually as the underground. Moreover, you can charge your computer, surf on the Internet, make phone calls or even order a tasty hot meal during the trip, and the train fare is slightly lower than most of the airline tickets.  

China’s construction of its transportation system did not stop at the connection of just Beijing and Shanghai. Nowadays you can find an underground style map at China’s railroad stations, except that this is a map of high-speed train and it covers almost all the large cities of the country.

The underground within cities has also been built rapidly. Back in 2006 when I was in Shanghai, the city had only around 100 kilometers of underground, 25% of London’s underground at that time. Today this number is almost 700 kilometers, while London is having approximately the same length compared with 12 years ago.

This rapid development of transportation comes from the transportation-favoring economic policy that China has held for tens of years. In the classical economic theory, when a country wants to develop its economy, the government has to do something that the market will neither do very efficiently nor voluntarily by itself, and building the infrastructure is clearly one of them. 

A more subtle detail of the transportation development policy in China that has often been neglected is that China adopted an energy efficient and appropriate way for its transportation policy, which I believe is even more remarkable than the astonishing speed of its infrastructural construction.

In the three major transportation methods that can be developed, i.e., railroad based transportation (including both train and underground), automobile and aviation, China made a clear choice that railroad based transportation is first. This is more energy efficient, given the fact that geographically speaking China is a huge country, and more suitable to China’s energy resource characteristic, which is rich with the natural reserve of coal but poor with oil. Neither automobile nor aviation can be perfectly fueled by coal and electricity, and neither of them can be as energy efficient as railroad based transportation in such a large country. 

The development of China’s transportation system is not limited to its railroad and underground. Its aviation system, although not as astonishing, is now one of the world’s safest systems. It is much safer than the contemporary systems in Eastern Europe, Africa and South America, and is standing at an equivalent level when compared with the systems in North America and Western Europe.

Even more remarkable is that all the above achievements in China’s transportation systems are obtained with a per capita GDP level of merely around 15% of the United States, calculated on a nominal basis. It is quite clear that China’s government and economy have done a remarkable job at this point, and basing on such a fact, I am pretty sure that China’s economy will not be even close to its limit at this level.

(The author is the Chief Strategist at Cinda Securities, Oxon. The article reflects the author's opinion, and not necessarily the views of CGTN.)