China’s High-Speed Rail: Overbuilt But That’s Not The Point

The world’s greatest rail system is not without problems

By: Andy Wong Ming Jun

All aboard?

Although the growth of China’s high speed rail network is widely hailed as one of the greatest infrastructure and construction achievements of the 21^st century, it runs the risk of vast overbuilding, resembling in many ways the country’s infamous ghost cities, forests of skyscrapers characterized by modern infrastructure and empty buildings. But while trains are running empty today, planners expect eventual payoff.

Ever since its first line connecting Beijing and Tianjin opened in August 2008, the network has expanded at an unprecedented rate which has shown no signs of slowing. As of 2025, more than two-thirds of the entire world’s high-speed network was from China alone, with around 50,000 km currently in active service and well on track to hit 70,000 km by 2035, albeit with some super-fast trains rocketing through stations with no waiting passengers.

Passengers welcome – any passengers

Despite its success as one of the most high-profile national stories used by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to trumpet its recovery on the world stage as a politically resurgent and technologically superior major power set to challenge American post-Cold War unitary superpower domination of international politics, the rail-building explosion isn’t immune to domestic detractors, some originating from reputable and institutionally approved individual sources.

Academician Lu Dadao, for instance, recently published an essay titled “The Glory of High-Speed Rail: What About Its Problems?” on a blog run by China’s Bureau of Academic Divisions and the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The network, he argued, had grown at a breakneck pace but only because it ignored what he called “basic economic logic” and the consequent weakening of public finances. As of 2022, the company was holding nearly $870 billion in debt, with daily operating losses of around $24 million on parts of the network – especially in the midwest – indicating that many lines simply cannot pay for themselves.

More worryingly than the financial pitfalls arising from overbuilt, underused, unprofitable high speed rail lines, he wrote, was the political drive in building for building’s sake at the cost of neglecting seamless last-mile urban connectivity and the creation of the deserted ghost towns where organic agglomeration of economic activity and human population growth never quite meet the theoretical projections envisaged by Chinese planners.

The point of Chinese high speed rail was never about making money. It was about creating artificial, debt-funded demand to handle what would otherwise be an oversupply of Chinese steel.

As Lu pointed out, China’s initial plans in 2004 for a “four-vertical, four-horizontal” passenger grid of passenger-dedicated lines and an intercity express network originally intended to be done by 2020 were instead announced as being effectively accomplished by 2016.

The current Chinese high speed rail plan proposed in 2016 has doubled up on the 2004 plans by calling for an “eight-vertical, eight-horizontal” grid network to be completed by 2030, something which can be best summed up in a quote from the movie Jurassic Park: “Your scientists (or in China’s case, politicians) were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.”

It should come as no surprise that the time period in which the original “four by four” high speed rail plan was accomplished also coincided with massive growth in Chinese steel production capacity, going from 31 percent of global production in 2005 to 50 percent in 2015. Yet Chinese steel exports didn’t grow at a rate that would have justified or fully utilized its increased steel production capacity, with exports to its primary four markets, the US, EU, Japan, and South Korea, actually decreasing from 45 percent to 23 percent of total Chinese exports worldwide.

This was made up for by increases in Chinese steel exported to other foreign markets such as ASEAN, the Middle East, and Africa respectively, but the simple reality remained that Chinese steel still needed domestic demand to soak up the excess. And one of the main domestic demand drivers would be its high-speed rail industry.

However, notwithstanding the economic and fiscal prudence angle of restraint being argued against the current growth of Chinese high-speed rail infrastructure, China's overbuilt, underused high speed rail network now is actually a blessing in disguise for the future if viewed from a different perspective in urban planning, political socioengineering angle, and laying of favorable conditions for the future.

For one thing, it is easier to build rail infrastructure if you don't need to do it through already long-established urban cities. The zombified continuation of what is arguably a failed attempt at building high-speed rail in the form of HS2 in the UK serves as a cautionary tale of what happens when building heavy transport infrastructure is entirely left to the point of time when demand far outstrips current supply and capacity.

Not only is it too little too late, choosing to build something like high-speed rail lines only after dense urban conurbations have been established and deeply entrenched inevitably leads to the entire construction and planning process becoming bogged down in financially ruinous, time-consuming, and sometimes politically damaging negotiations between government and everybody who lives along the planned route to acquire required land, or agree on ameliorating measures to placate concerns about noise pollution from residents.

When it comes to building heavy transport infrastructure like railways, it is better to err on the side of overbuilding when there are no physical constraints, than under-building because of physical constraints.

Lu’s use of the Lanzhou-Xinjiang high speed railway as a negative example to illustrate Chinese demographically-illogical and fiscally wasteful high-speed rail construction entirely ignores the reality of that line being entirely motivated by political and military considerations. The CCP doesn't care about making money from a high-speed railway route through some of its most remote and far-flung regions on its Western border, but it certainly cares about being able to shorten the time and distance between Xinjiang and the westernmost nexus of what traditionally was deemed Han Chinese political control at Lanzhou.

This shortening of geographical distance is crucial in its "Sinification" campaign of pacification through cultural and racial assimilation of the Uighur-majority Xinjiang province, just as how the Trans-American Railroad was crucial to the expansion of nascent American federal power and colonization westwards beyond the American Midwestern states and eastern seaboard.

Or if relatively peaceful “Sinification” does not work, having that Lanzhou-Xinjiang high speed railway allows for the CCP to have a direct ingress route to swiftly bring police or army reinforcements to suppress any local revolt against Han Chinese-majority, Communist Party rule.

The Lanzhou-Urumqi high-speed rail link also provides crucial ground-laying for China to even consider in the future the possibility of building a railspur north from Urumqi, aiming to cross the Altai Range and potentially link up to the Trans-Siberian Railway at Novosibirsk.

The idea of China having plans to link its rail infrastructure up to Russia isn’t far-fetched. China is already working on the Mohe-Magadan railway line to link Yakutia Oblast in the Russian Far East overland with its northeast province of Heilongjiang, which although not high speed in nature, will open up direct and secure Chinese access to massive reserves of natural resources like coal, natural gas, timber, and iron ore.

Coal, natural gas, and iron ore are most significant, because currently China still imports coal and iron ore from Australia, and natural gas from the Middle East via the Straits of Malacca, all of which could be blockaded by the US in a potential future Second Pacific War.

A rail spur in the west to connect China's northwest to the Trans-Siberian Railway, with high-speed rail existing as far as Urumqi in Xinjiang, would be the ideal second pincer hook to close up China's grip on Siberian Russia east of the Urals.

Thus, Lu Dadao's assertion that China's high speed railway network "ignored basic economic logic, weakened public finances, and derailed regional planning" is some kind of problem that needs solving misses the point entirely. In other words, what Lu finds as a bug, is actually the feature of the entire enterprise to begin with.

Peter Frankopan concluded in his recent article covering Lu’s critique of Chinese high-speed rail that "The lesson is not that high-speed rail is a mistake – far from it – but that it must be aligned with real demand, realistic forecasts, and a sober understanding of long-term costs. Otherwise, it risks becoming a spectacular but hollow monument to ambition outrunning judgment."

Andy Wong Ming Jun writes about defense matters for Asia Sentinel