Desert-circling rail line latest link in China’s push for influence, control
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- 2021-10-17_Chinese President Xi Jinping is seen on a billboard with the slogan, "Administer Xinjiang according to law, unite and stabilize the territory, culturally moisturize the territory, enrich the people and rejuvenate the territory, and build the territory for a long term," in Yarkent County in northwestern China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region on March 21, 2021. Four years after Beijing's brutal crackdown on largely Muslim minorities native to Xinjiang, Chinese authorities are dialing back the region's high-tech police state and stepping up tourism. But even as a sense of normality returns, fear remains, hidden but pervasive. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)
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By Richard S. Ehrlich - SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES - - Sunday, October 17, 2021
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Soruce: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/20 ... nas-push-/ Accessed: 2021-10-17Trains have emerged as a central component of the Communist leadership’s push for both domestic control and foreign influence. A train link to the remote Tibetan capital of Lhasa was hailed as a key step in connecting the restive region to the rest of China, while rail-building projects are featured in a number of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road program of international infrastructure support.
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At home, China is constructing maglev train systems, capable of hurtling passengers and freight hundreds of miles per hour, including an underwater route near Shanghai to reach tiny offshore islands.
These latest railways have become a talking point for China’s military, industrial, agricultural and political prowess in the state-controlled press, at a time when the Biden administration is struggling to get its own major infrastructure bill passed through a reluctant Congress.
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Closer to Beijing meanwhile, a maglev train project is starting in Shanxi, a north central province. Magnets allow maglev train carriages to float without wheels.
“The high-speed train uses superconducting magnetic levitation technology to disengage from the ground to eliminate frictional drag,” Chinese engineering expert Ma Tiehua said, according to London-based Railway Technology news.
This maglev uses “a near-vacuum internal duct line to dramatically reduce air resistance, to achieve travel speeds of more than [620 miph],” Mr. Ma said.
China already boasts the world’s fastest commercial maglev on a 19-mile route in Shanghai, linking