China’s high-speed rail network now stretches more than 50,000 kilometres across the country — longer than the combined high-speed rail networks of every other nation on Earth put together — and the entire system was built in roughly 17 years, beginning with a single line opened for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and now connects 33 of the country’s 34 provincial-level divisions with trains running at routine commercial speeds of 350 kilometres per hour

The year an American president signs a major infrastructure bill, a Chinese provincial governor breaks ground on three high-speed rail lines in the same week. The asymmetry is structural, the pace is sustained, and the cumulative result, after roughly 17 years, is a national rail network of a size and density that has no precedent [...] The post China’s high-speed rail network now stretches more than 50,000 kilometres across the country — longer than the combined high-speed rail networks of ever