2024 China Liase Official Website

Julia Colón

March 13th, 2024

Our morning began bright and early with a departure time of 6 am. We were all a little bummed out because the hotel breakfast hadn’t opened yet, and it was arguably one of the best ones of the entire trip. Anyways, we made our way to the train station in Chongqing, said farewell to our fabulous tour guide Michael, and boarded the train. 

The trip from Chongqing to Beijing is approximately 6/6.5 hours on a high-speed railway train. The majority of us knocked out immediately and woke back up at around 11:30/12 for our lecture on the high speed railway in China and the overall purpose of its development. We learned that the high speed railway trains in China can reach a speed of up to 350 km per hour, which is the fastest speed that has currently been reached by any other high speed railway system in the world. Additionally, one of the overall purposes of developing this infrastructure was to promote urbanization in specific areas of the country. We passed through a city that we were told only existed because a high speed railway station had been placed there. After the lecture, we ate lunch on board the train before arriving in Beijing. 

Upon our arrival, we met our new tour guide, Cathy, who took us straight to the Summer Palace. We learned that the Summer Palace grounds were all man made, including the lake and mountains that surrounded it and was actually reconstructed after its destruction in the Second Opium war by Emperor Guangxu, which he gifted to the Empress Dowager Cixi. We were given some free time to explore the grounds and take in all the beautiful scenery. Right as the sun was starting to go down, we headed back to the hotel to set our stuff down before dinner. 

After dinner, a few of us decided to split off and check out the olympic village which was really fun as many members of the group recall the Beijing 2008 games as the most memorable olympics of their childhood. In all honesty, the London 2016 games were probably the most memorable of my childhood, but it was still an awesome thing to see. We made the trek back to the hotel successfully and called it a night!

We rose at an ungodly hour to ensure that we would beat the traffic and make it to our 7:30 train from Chongqingbei to Beijingshi. While we were aboard, we received a lecture by two representatives from the ‘Research and Innovation’ sector of the China Rail Corporation, about China’s growing high-speed rail system. A few statistics of note: 70% of the world’s rail kilometrage is in China, and in 2023 the rail system there had a personage of 2.8 billion. The representatives emphasized safety, accessibility, affordability, sustainability and comfort for the rider as the primary concerns of the rail corporation.

Rail travel ultimately creates the effect of compressing the temporal and embodied experience of traveling through space, and is inherently discerning between spaces that are incorporated into a system of connection, and those that are not. More and more different spaces and places through the country are being connected by rail, starting between the most ‘metropolitan’ areas, and also connecting them with tourist cities. He explained that a city would have to have a population of over 500,000 people before it qualified for a high speed rail station.

He spoke about a brand new high speed rail line opened in Indonesia in the last several years, as an example of China exporting their infrastructure innovation with other countries. A member of the group posed a question on this point, saying that through her personal relationships she knows that local people are not happy with the rail line there. He said that since he was unfortunately not a foreign diplomat, he could not speak on that.