The Null Device

China's pan-Eurasian high-speed railway

Not content with its own massive internal high-speed rail programme, China is planning to build high-speed railway lines spanning Asia. The lines will drive westwards through Bhutan, India, the central Asian republics and into Turkey, ultimately connecting with Europe's networks; there will also be another trans-Siberian high-speed line (though weren't the Russians looking into using Japanese shinkansen technology for that?) and an eastward line heading down to Singapore, via Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand. The plan is to have trains running at between 200 and 350kmh, bringing a journey between London and Beijing down to two days. Mind you, that involves transit through Iran and Burma (both closed societies whose authorities like to keep a tight grip on anything coming or going) and crossing the somewhat fraught Indian-Pakistani border.

China will fund the programme, in return for mineral rights from the countries, and won't harp on about human rights; already, the Burmese junta has signed on.

There are 1 comments on "China's pan-Eurasian high-speed railway":

Posted by: nnyhav

Fri Mar 12 02:56:46 2010

just curious whether it was intended to bracket animal rights in prior post with mineral rights and human rights in this one ...

Want to say something? Do so here.

Post pseudonymously

Display name:
URL:(optional)
To prove that you are not a bot,
please enter the text in the image on the right
in the field below it.

Your Comment:

Please keep comments on topic and to the point. Inappropriate comments may be deleted.

Note that markup is stripped from comments; URLs will be automatically converted into links.