BEIJING In southwestern Yunnan Province, giant concrete pillars bestride the fields, tracing the route of one of scores of new rail lines that China is building.

In western Xinjiang, construction crews toil on a lonely line crossing the desert wastes to the Silk Road city of Kashgar.

From one end of the country to the other, China is in the midst of a railroad boom that promises to transform the world’s third-largest economy, after those of the United States and Japan.

By making it easier to move people and goods, the railroad mania will gradually shift the center of economic gravity inland, accelerating the development of central and western China in an echo of America’s experience in the 19th century.

Jing Ulrich, chairwoman of the China equities and commodities business at J.P. Morgan, said she also saw comparisons with the construction of the Interstate highway system in the United States and the shinkansen high-speed rail network in Japan, both of which brought far-reaching socioeconomic changes.

"However, due to the immense scale of construction, faster service speeds and China’s vast population, the transformative impact may be even more profound," she said in a recent report.

As better transportation links encourage manufacturers to relocate away from the coast, demand for property in the interior will grow, lifting consumer sentiment and retail sales. The railroads will also be a boon for tourism, Ms. Ulrich said.

Taking freight and passenger traffic together, China already has the world’s busiest railroad system. But measured by the size of the country and the needs of 1.3 billion people, the system is puny.

The density of the network, measured in kilometers of line per million inhabitants, is less than a tenth of those in Russia, the United States or Canada, a seventh of the European Union’s and about a third of Japan’s, according to the World Bank.

This sparse network, totaling 86,000 kilometers, or 54,000 miles, at the end of 2009, is so overburdened that it carries a quarter of the world’s rail traffic on about 6 percent of the world’s lines.

It is no wonder that China suffers periodic energy shortages, because coal trains are delayed in reaching power stations as they are shunted onto sidings to make way for passenger trains.

Well aware of the problem, the government turned the financial crisis into an opportunity to fast-forward its long-term plan to lengthen the network to 120,000 kilometers by 2020.

Railroad construction invigorated the economy last year by creating six million jobs and generating demand for 20 million tons of steel and 120 million tons of cement.

"If the policy is that large cash infusions create jobs, then from a transport perspective railways is certainly the place where the financing is necessary," said John Scales, the lead transportation policy specialist for the World Bank in Beijing.

By the end of 2009, work was under way on no less than 33,000 kilometers of lines, according to analysts at Macquarie, the investment bank.

With the Ministry of Railways budgeting a 17 percent increase in spending this year to 823 billion renminbi, or $120 billion, the analysts said that they believed the 120,000-kilometer target could be reached as soon as 2015 and that they saw a good chance that it would be raised to 150,000 kilometers.

The economic case for expanding the rail network is clear-cut. During a country’s development phase, total demand for transportation tends to grow faster than income.

But some critics say China is putting too much emphasis on high-speed rail lines capable of accommodating speeds of as much as 350 kilometers an hour.

China already has the longest operational high-speed network in the world, at 6,552 kilometers, and it intends to double that total to 13,000 kilometers by 2012 by upgrading existing track and building new lines.

When the high-speed line linking Beijing and Shanghai opens by early 2012, the journey time will be cut to 4 hours from 10.

China is rightly proud of the giant strides it is making. It is seeking to build a high-speed rail line in California and is bidding for a contract to link Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia.

At home, the aim is to reduce if possible the travel time to each provincial capital from second-tier towns in that province to two hours or less, bringing economic benefits.

Yet Zhao Jian, a professor at Jiaotong University in Beijing, who specializes in rail economics, is scathing in his assessment of what he calls the "blind pursuit of speed".

He said in the monthly journal Comprehensive Transportation that China could have built an extra 30,000 kilometers of conventional track with the money saved from what he characterized as "extravagant" high-speed lines.

China, he argued, does not have the technological experience to be sure of operating such lines safely. Moreover, high-speed trains gobble up energy and subsidies.

There is no high-speed railway in the world that can be financially self-sustaining, Mr. Zhao said in the journal. "The large-scale construction of high-speed railway passenger lines in China will definitely be confronted with huge risks".

High-speed rail travel could even pose social and political risks, he added, since fares on the new trains are three times as high as those on ordinary trains.

In addition, he said, the Ministry of Railways is deliberately reducing the frequency of slower trains to make passengers use the new services.

"This will be met with strong social discontent," Mr. Zhao said.

Mr. Scales, the World Bank expert, sees things differently.

"In other parts of the world, nobody would think of designing new passenger lines for less than 350 kilometers per hour," he said. "So it’s very reasonable."

He added, "And remember that many of the dedicated passenger lines are not built to move passengers, but to get passengers off the freight lines. That’s where the real bottlenecks are."

BEIJING, Jan. 14 (Xinhua) -- China's Internet is open and welcomes international companies, a Foreign Ministry spokesperson said Thursday, just two days after Google issued a statement saying it might quit China.

Spokeswoman Jiang Yu told a regular news briefing that China encouraged development of the Internet.

"China's Internet is open," said Jiang. "China has tried creating a favorable environment for Internet," said Jiang while responding to a question on Google's possible retreat.

"China welcomes international Internet companies to conduct business within the country according to law," she said. "China's law prohibits cyber crimes including hacker attacks."

Google's corporate development and chief legal officer, David Drummond, posted a statement on the company's official blog on Tuesday, indicating the possibility that Google may "shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China."

The statement said that its disputes with the government and unidentified attacks targeting Google's services in China forced the company to make the review of "the feasibility of our business operations in China."

Google sent a short statement to Xinhua Wednesday, saying, "We are proud of our achievements in China. Currently we are reviewing the decision and hope for a resolution."

According to the iResearch Consulting Group, the Chinese search engine market reached nearly 7 billion yuan (about 1 billion U.S. dollars) in 2009, and Google took 32.8 percent of the market in the third-quarter while China's home-grown search engine Baidu claimed 63.8 percent.

A new approach to China

Report sparks concern over jewelry
By Huang Jingjing

Zhong Yanzi, a mother of a 5-month-old girl in Hunan Province, told the Global Times that she was alarmed.

"It is hard to imagine that even trinkets are poisonous," she said. "I wouldn't buy any alloy for my child any more, except pure silver and gold."

China pushes global channels for media
China Daily, January 6, 2010

China is rolling out an ambitious plan to support and expand the global presence of its media and publication companies, though an industry expert warned of challenges to the nation's "going out" program.

Domestic publication companies will be encouraged to invest abroad by establishing overseas branches, making media takeovers or working with foreign counterparts as partners, according to the latest guideline released by the General Administration of Press and Publication.

"The plan is to let the world know more about China and to enhance the influence of Chinese culture," said Fan Weiping, head of the administration's publication industrialization department, to China Daily yesterday.

The central government will provide support in policy, resources, information and other services that broaden its media outlets through publications, copyrights and brands, according to the guideline.

"I hope Chinese cultural enterprises will be booming at every corner of the world like Chinese restaurants have," he said.

As of this year, the Chinese mainland has 958 publishers of books and electronic print products and boasts 9,549 magazines and 1,943 newspapers.

The output of the press and publishing industry is expected to hit 1 trillion yuan (US$147 billion) in 2009, according to government statistics.

Fan said the administration has signed a framework agreement with the Bank of China to finance expansion ventures. Other commercial banks are expected to sign on in the future to support public and private publication enterprises.

He added the scale and presence of the Chinese press and printing industry overseas are still relatively small because of cultural barriers.

But the successful globalization of "Made in China" products can't be applied to cultural products, said Yu Guoming, associate dean of the School of Journalism and Communication in Renmin University of China.

"Selling the Chinese press and publications everywhere is not going to happen because of cultural differences and how the Chinese media is received in different regions of the world," said Yu. "We call it 'culture discount'."

He suggested that the nation's publishing and media firms that are seeking to expand abroad should seek commonalities with their foreign counterparts first.

"The investment in the culture industry will not be successful in crossing over unless investors learn and understand the rules of other cultures," Yu said.

The Chinese government's ad campaign to promote "Made in China" products on cable news outlet CNN was cited by Yu as a good example of sharing the Chinese culture and values to the West.

The guideline also said China will encourage private enterprises to play a bigger role in the publishing industry.

Private capital will be permitted to enter the publishing industry as content suppliers or partners to publish books about science and technology, finance, the arts and other fields, according to the guideline.

China previously only allowed limited private investment in printing and publishing industry.

It also encouraged publishing companies to employ self-financing measures by issuing corporate bonds, absorbing foreign investments and going public.