Eideard

Even as China prepares to open bullet train service between Beijing and Shanghai by July 1, its steadily expanding high-speed rail network is being pilloried on a scale rare among Chinese citizens and the news media. Complaints include the system’s high costs and fares, the quality of construction and an allegation of self-dealing by a rail minister who was fired this year on grounds of corruption.

Often overlooked amid all the controversy are the very real economic benefits that the world’s most advanced fast-rail system is bringing to China, and the competitive challenges it poses for the United States and Europe.

Just as building the interstate highway system in the United States a half-century ago made modern commerce more feasible on a national scale, China’s ambitious rail rollout is helping to integrate the economy of this sprawling, populous nation. In China’s case, it is doing so on a much faster construction timetable and at significantly higher travel speeds than anything envisioned by the United States in the 1950s…

Zhen Qinan, a founder of the stock exchange in the coastal city of Shenzhen and the recently retired chief executive of ZK Energy, a wind turbine producer in Changsha, said that high-speed trains were making it more convenient to base businesses here in Hunan Province — a populous region that has long provided labor to the factories of the east, but whose mountain ranges have tended to isolate it from the economic mainstream…

Throughout China, real estate prices and investments have risen sharply in the more than 200 inland cities that have already been connected by high-speed lines in the past three years. Businesses are flocking to these cities, now just a few hours by bullet train from China’s busiest and most international metropolises.

Meanwhile, a shift in passenger traffic to the new high-speed rail routes has freed up congested older rail lines for freight. That has allowed coal mines and shippers to switch to cheaper rail transport from costly trucks for heavy cargos.

Because of this shift, plus the further construction of freight rail lines, the tonnage hauled by China’s rail system increased in 2010 by an amount equaling the entire freight carried last year by the combined rail systems of Britain, France, Germany and Poland, according to the World Bank.

The bullet train bonanza, and the competitive challenge it poses for the West, is only likely to increase with the opening of the 1,320-kilometer Beijing-to-Shanghai line, which will create a business corridor between China’s two most dynamic cities. The Ministry of Railways plans 90 bullet trains a day in each direction…

President Barack Obama, who has proposed spending $53 billion on high-speed rail over the next six years, faced a setback in his budget deal in April with Republicans in Congress, which eliminated money for that plan this year.

The fact that this was an Obama proposal is sufficient reason for Republicans to block another potential advance in our stumbling economy. It will not be allowed to happen.

Last autumn, newly elected Republican governors in Florida, Ohio and Wisconsin turned down U.S. money that their Democratic predecessors had won for new rail routes, worrying that their states could end up covering most of the costs for trains that would draw few riders…

RTFA. Lengthy, lots of detail – including the guaranteed modicum of Cold Warrior semantics required of any NY TIMES writer covering China. No matter, the logistics are what is going to make a significant and global difference. As boring as I found the years I spent at the craft during one of my careers there is a satisfying measure to tasks requiring above all else a devotion to timely delivery within a system.

This will count as a significant factor in China’s decades-long task of bringing modern employment and urbanization to the Western Provinces.