China’s Global Rail Mission ‘Covering the World’

PRESS RELEASE

China’s Global Rail Mission ‘Covering the World’

Nov. 3, 2015 (EIRNS)—Macau Magazine ran a powerful review of China’s world-wide rail development program, called "Global Track —China Sees Its Rail Covering the World," by Luo Xunzhi. The article reflects the worldview presented in EIR’s World Land-Bridge report, and, as it is now circulating across China in Chinese, may in fact be one of the author’s sources.

It opens:

"In just eight years, China has built the largest network of high-speed railways on earth. Now it wants to do the same around the world. The plan includes a line to link Beijing and Moscow in 33 hours, and routes across South America from the Atlantic to the Pacific and across Africa from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic—something the European colonial powers never achieved. Never in history has a country proposed such an ambitious programme. If they are all built, they will transform the economies of the countries through which they pass, like the trans-Pacific railway in the United States in the 19th century, which opened up the western states to settlement by farmers and industrial growth."

Other aspects:

"The most dramatic project of the One Road, One Belt initiative in Russia is a proposed high-speed line between Beijing and Moscow, running through Kazakhstan; a distance of 7,000 km, it would cut the journey time from the current six days to 30 hours.... First Vice President of Russian Railways Alexander Misharin said he expected construction would take from 8 to 10 years. He compared the new railway network to the Suez Canal in terms of scale and significance."
"More than any other continent, Africa needs railways. China has been very active there, promising to build what none of the European colonial powers—Britain, France, Portugal, Belgium or Germany—were able to do: a railway from the Indian to the Atlantic Ocean."
"In East Africa, China is building a 472-km line between the Kenyan capital of Nairobi and the country’s main port of Mombasa that will cut the journey time from 15 hours to four and a half. Construction began in October 2014 and is due to be completed in 2017, at an estimated cost of US$3.8 billion. The plan is for the line to be part of a new network linking Kenya, Rwanda, South Sudan and Uganda."
"In May 2015, during a visit to South America, Prime Minister Li Keqiang and Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff witnessed the signing of a feasibility study for a 4,400-km railway linking the Atlantic coast of Brazil with the Pacific coast of Peru. It was signed by the two countries and China.... Spain and Portugal, the two powers that colonised South America, never considered such a railway across the continent."
"For the first time, China has started to build railways in Europe, the place which invented the technology 200 years ago. This has the richest historical significance, a sign of how the centre of the global economy is shifting from west to east."
"China is also bidding to build Britains HS2, a high-speed train that will link the central city of Birmingham with Leeds and Manchester in the north. This bid is full of symbolism—the worlds newest railway power selling its technology and expertise to the oldest.... No mandarin in the Qing government could have imagined such an outcome."

See the full article.