China's railway technology, which is undergoing continuous innovation and climbing up into the world's leading echelon, has become something that the country is known for around the world.
The 600 kilometer-an-hour maglev train project, which run faster than any other type of trains in operation today, is in the full swing of development by China's largest rail transportation equipment maker, State-owned CRRC Corp, according to a statement the company sent to the Global Times on Thursday.
The experiment began in October in Qingdao, East China's Shandong Province. It is expected to be completed by 2021, the statement noted.
If successful, the project will be one of the industry's latest technological breakthroughs, catching up with the test speed record of 603 kilometers an hour that Japan has held since April 2015, Wu Mengling, a professor of railway construction at Shanghai-based Tongji University, told the Global Times on Wednesday.
China is already home to the world's fastest commercially operating train, with the Shanghai Maglev Train connecting Longyang Road station with Pudong International Airport. The maglev runs at a speed of 431 kilometers an hour, Wu noted.
In addition to maglev trains, China's homegrown high-speed rail industry has gone one step further and embarked on a global march.
China has sold its high-speed rail know-how across the world in recent years, and has already constructed more than 5,000 kilometers of high-speed rail in countries like Pakistan, Turkey, Saudi Arabic, Thailand, Russia, Indonesia and Hungary, said media reports.
The world-class expertise also brought export opportunities for high-speed-railway-related equipment and products such as medium-speed rail stock, bullet trains and light rail systems, according to CRRC. The exports accounted for 30 percent of the global locomotive market in 2015.
"We have exported equipment to 101 countries and regions, and revenues from the overseas market are surging," Zhang Yong, a spokesperson of CRRC, told the Global Times on Wednesday, noting that orders from foreign market have grown 126 percent year-on-year in the first half of 2016.
The acclaimed railway tech products have also knocked on the doors of traditional leading player in the sector like Germany. Deutsche Bahn, Germany's national railway operator, is opening a purchasing office in Beijing and will start buying trains and spare parts from China in the next three to five years, chnrailway.com reported in September. The Germany company was not available for comment as of press time.
Made in China
When Chinese Premier Li Keqiang promoted China's high-speed rail during his visits to Asia, Africa, Australia and Europe, he told foreign railway company executives that China's homegrown rail technologies were safe, reliable and economically competitive.
Such cost-effectiveness features are the biggest advantages of China's homegrown high-speed railways, Zhao Jian, a professor at Beijing Jiaotong University, told the Global Times on Wednesday.
For example, Chinese rail costs were priced between $17 million and $21 million per kilometer on average, while non-Chinese companies charge between $25 million and $39 million per kilometer, according to a paper titled High-Speed Railways in China: A Look at Construction Costs issued by the World Bank in July 2014.
China's bullet trains were also one-third cheaper than long-standing high-speed rail exporters Japan and Germany, and took half the time to build as the Japanese ones, South China Morning Post reported on June 27.
At the same time, "China has set the world record many times thanks to its cutting-edged and innovative expertise," said Wu, the professor.
Since the first high-speed rail debut in 2008 between Beijing and Tianjin, the country has built the world's largest network of high-speed rail - more than 12,000 kilometers, or 60 percent of world's total, with a network extending from Harbin, Northeast China's Heilongjiang Province, where the temperature usually plunges to -30 C, to Sanya, South China's Hainan Province, where the temperatures can rise above 40 C, and even to the high-altitude Qinghai-Tibet Plateau in Southwest China.
"The diverse geographic and climate conditions used to pose challenges to train operators. But apparently, Chinese manufactures have proven their ability to overcome such technological hurdles, making it an ideal choice for foreign countries with more extreme climates," Li Qun, a spokesperson of State-owned China Communication Construction Co, a company engaged in infrastructure construction of railways, told the Global Times on Friday.
Benefiting from the "enormous economies of scale," the country has also accumulated plenty of experience in designing, building, operating and maintaining the railways, Wu noted.
On August 15, China's standard bullet train, or Electric Multiple Units (EMUs), made its inaugural trip at 350 kilometers per hour, which pushed the country's train technology one step closer to world-class.
Starting as a student
Although China possesses unprecedented advantages in railway construction, production and operation, it has still not acquired every core railway technology in bullet train production, Zhao noted.
An employee at CRRC, who only talked on condition of anonymity, agreed. "It's fairer to say that we are standing on the shoulders of giants," the employee told the Global Times on Friday, noting that history of China's railway technology development can be better described as absorbing, digesting and re-innovating.
At the beginning, China signed technology transfer and cooperation agreements with leading train manufacturers including French Alstom, Germany's Siemens, Canada's Bombardier and Kawasaki Heavy Industries in Japan. "This was the period when Chinese engineers quickly learned critical foreign technologies," the employee said.
Take the eight-car CRH3 trains running between Beijing and Tianjin at a service speed of 300 kilometers an hour. The first three train sets were supplied by Siemen's Krefeld plant in Germany in 2005, but the remainder was built in China where Siemens provided technical support.
After that, China railway industry started producing new generations of the high-speed train sets by "adapting, optimizing and re-innovating foreign tech know-how," said the employee, noting that homegrown trains could travel faster and safer after the improvements.
Therefore, there are certain core technologies, such as bearings and the braking system that domestic manufactures are still licensing from the foreign railway giant, Zhao said.
Although it might take some time to achieve 100 percent domestic technology in train production, experts are confident about the outlook for China's domestic railway industry, as research has yielded significant progress.
"We are already one of the leading players in the railway sector," the employee said, "Who said that a student cannot surpass a teacher?"
