【英语中国】高铁助中国经济走上快行道

Will Freeman / Arthur Kroeber


The 350-kilometer-per-hour Wuguang Harmony Express rockets through China's heartland delivering passengers 1,000 kilometers from Wuhan to Guangzhou -- roughly the distance between Washington, D.C. and Chicago -- in just three hours. Outside, quintessential scenes of modern China unfold. Future urban districts populated only by cranes, the skeletons of concrete buildings and the cooling towers of coal-fired power plants rise out of fields of bright-yellow rapeseed dotted with the occasional dilapidated brick farmhouse.

Such glimpses of an agrarian country still in its initial stages of development make the state-of-the-art Wuguang Harmony Express seem an extravagant indulgence, an emblem of Beijing's obsession with infrastructure, regardless of cost or utility. Critics say China's mammoth high-speed passenger rail network (16,000 kilometers of which a quarter is complete) serves no useful purpose and will saddle the country with a crippling debt.

Such criticism is misguided. The high-speed rail program is not a desperate throw of gold-plated dice in response to the global financial crisis, but a carefully considered component of a long planned and desperately needed upgrade of China's rail system.

As incomes rise, China's passenger railroads will become by far the world's busiest. Moving passenger traffic off clogged conventional rail lines will free up room for an explosion of freight traffic, so increased freight revenue will pay the capital cost of building the new lines. And by reducing the need for airplanes, cars and trucks to carry passengers and freight, the system will yield big savings in energy intensity and carbon emissions.

China's rail system is already the most intensively used in the world. China carries a quarter of the world's rail freight and passenger traffic on only 6% of the world's track. China's intensity of rail use (passenger and freight combined) is double India's, triple that of the United States, and a dozen times Europe's. Over the next decade, China's Ministry of Railways expects freight carriage to rise 55%, while passenger-miles will double. More miles of track are not a luxury, but a necessity. In addition to the high-speed lines, the ministry plans to lay another 18,000 kilometers of new conventional freight and passenger track by 2020.

One objection is that high-speed lines cost far more to build than conventional lines. Maybe new passenger lines are not a luxury, but high-speed lines are.

Wrong again. In France, Spain or Japan a mile of high-speed track costs triple a conventional mile. But in China, according to World Bank estimates, the cost premium is as low as 20% to 30%. Cheap labor and locally produced equipment help; so does the decision to build much of the network on viaducts, minimizing land acquisition cost. Finally, building an entire network all at once produces massive economies of scale.

This modest cost premium translates into affordable ticket prices -- higher than for conventional rail, but lower than for air travel. The average household income in China's 36 biggest cities is now more than $10,000, so tens of millions of Chinese can easily afford high-speed tickets, especially for business trips.

On several recent trips on the Nanjing-Wuhan, Wuhan-Guangzhou and Guangzhou-Shenzhen lines, we found the trains to be about 90% full. The World Bank reckons that in a few years' time the Beijing-Hong Kong line will carry more than 80 million passengers a year, becoming the world's busiest high-speed passenger rail line.

But the really big gain is that by moving most passenger traffic off existing conventional lines, more space is freed up for cargo. China's businesses -- ranging from manufacturers to coal mines -- have complained for years about the difficulty of securing space on freight trains, which forces them to move a lot of their cargo on more expensive and less efficient trucks. An increase in rail capacity will enable them to put their freight back on trains, generating huge savings. Ton for ton, freight carried by rail costs nearly 70% less than carriage by truck, uses 77% less energy and produces 91% less carbon dioxide emissions.

All well and good, but these benefits will accrue over many years. The cost of building the network is happening now, and is financed mainly by a huge run-up in debt. Isn't the financial risk too great?

Actually, no. For one thing, building the network now, when labor costs are still low, is smarter than waiting a decade or two, when higher wages will push the real cost far higher. And anyway, financing projects whose economic benefit takes a long time to emerge is precisely what debt is for.

That said, Beijing does need to diversify the sources of rail finance. MOR's liabilities rose by nearly 50% in 2009 to 1.3 trillion yuan ($190 billion), and it is near the limit of its ability prudently to issue more bonds. It has begun to get local governments to shoulder about one-third of the cost of building new lines, but direct budgetary support from the central government may also be required in the next five-year plan.

Yet this is hardly unusual -- most countries with high-speed rail networks financed the capital construction mainly or entirely from budgetary funds. The bottom line is that, however it is financed, China's ambitious rail build-out is an investment well worth making.

---

Mr. Freeman is a research analyst and Mr. Kroeber is managing director at GaveKal Dragonomics, a Beijing-based research firm.

Will Freeman / Arthur Kroeber

时速350公里的武广和谐号高速列车乘载着一千名乘客，在短短三个小时内呼啸着从武汉穿越中国中心地带到达广州，这段距离大致相当于从华盛顿到芝加哥的距离。朝车窗外看去，现代中国的典型景象一览无余：大片灿烂金黄的油菜籽田地里，时而会出现一幢破败的砖瓦农舍，而诸多未来的城镇区正从中崛起，只不过目前只有起重机、混凝土建筑框架及火电厂冷却塔的身影。

这种仍处于发展初级阶段的农业国的场景，令现代的武广和谐号高速列车看起来是一种过度的奢侈，一种中国政府不顾成本及效用而痴迷于基建的象征。批评人士说，中国庞大的高速客车铁路网络(16,000公里中仅有四分之一完工)没有实际用处，并会使中国背上沉重的债务负担。

现在修建高铁网络是不错的投资。这种批评是一种误导。高铁工程并非是应对全球性金融危机的一种孤注一掷的行为，而是对急需升级的中国铁路系统进行的一项经过长期规划的精心考虑之举。

随着收入提高，中国铁路客运的繁忙程度将高居全球之首。将乘客从拥挤的普通铁路线上转移将会为爆炸性增长的货运释放空间，因而，货运收入增加将为建设新轨道支付资本成本。而通过减少飞机、小汽车及卡车的客货运需求，高铁系统通过降低能耗及减少碳排放方面将节约大笔资金。

中国的铁路已是全球最繁忙的铁路线了。中国的铁路客货运量占全球的四分之一，而铁路里程仅占全球的6%。中国的铁路客、货运繁忙程度是印度的两倍，是美国的三倍，而是欧洲的十二倍。中国铁道部预计，下一个10年中，货运将增加55%，而客运里程将翻倍。增加铁路里程并非奢侈之举，而属必要之为。除高铁外，铁道部计划至2020年前，增建18,000公里的普通客、货运铁路线。

反对的理由之一是高铁成本远远高于普通铁路线的修建成本，或许，新建客运铁路线并非奢侈，但修高铁的确是种浪费。

这种说法还是错了。在法国、西班牙及日本，一英里高铁的成本是普通铁路的三倍。但在中国，据世界银行(World Bank)估计，高铁的成本仅比普通铁路高出20%至30%。廉价的劳动力及国产设备在其中发挥了作用。修建更多高架桥的决定也是如此，修高架桥可将购地成本降至最低。最后，同时修建整个铁路网可产生巨大的规模经济效应。

高铁修建成本溢价不高也使得票价较为适宜：比普通火车票价高，但比机票低。目前中国36个规模最大城市的平均家庭收入超过1万美元，因而数千万中国人支付高铁票价较为轻松，特别是商务旅行更是如此。

近期在宁武线、武广线以及广深线做了几次旅行后，我们发现火车满座率几乎达到90%。据世界银行估计，几年后京港线每年载客量将超过8000万人，成为全球最繁忙的高速客运铁路线。

但真正的一项大收获是，将大部分客运从现存普通铁路线上分流，就能释放更多的货运空间。中国众多的企业，从制造商到煤矿，多年来一直抱怨难以获得充足的火车货运能力，以致不得不采用价格更高而效率更低的卡车运输。火车运力增加会使得这些企业重新用火车来进行货物运输，从而节省大量成本支出。以吨位计，火车货运成本比卡车低近70%，且所耗能源减少77%，二氧化碳排放也少91%。

听来当然不错，但这些好处要经过许多年方可逐渐显现。而建设这一铁路网的成本却是现在生成，而且主要是以大幅增加的巨额债务形式呈现的。这种财务风险是否过高呢？

实际并非如此。首先，现在开建这种铁路网络，劳力成本仍较低，因而比再等一、二十年待薪资上涨推高其它成本之时再建要明智得多。再者，不管怎样，为经济效益要等一段较长时期方能显现的工程融资正应该采用借债的形式。

然而，中国政府的确需要将铁路建设融资方式多样化。2009年中国铁道部的负债增加了近50%，达到1.3万亿元人民币(1900亿美元)，已濒临其慎重发债的极限。中国已开始让地方政府分担新建铁路所需成本的约三分之一，但下一个五年计划中还需要中央政府直接提供预算支持。

但这并非不同寻常，大多数拥有高铁网络的国家主要甚至完全由国家预算来为基本建设提供资金。底线是，不管资金从哪里来，中国雄心勃勃的铁路建设是一项很有价值的投资。

(编者按：本文作者弗里曼(Will Freeman)是位研究分析师，葛艺豪(Arthur Kroeber)是北京研究机构龙洲经讯（GaveKal Dragonomics）的董事总经理)