China Aims to Equip World With High-speed Trains

• Proeksa Meas
• 31 December 2015
• Construction Focus
• 1501 Views

China is currently in talks with 28 countries about high-speed rail projects, China CNR Corporation announced in February. Yu Weiping, one of the state-owned train manufacturer’s vice presidents, described the most promising projects as being in Russia, Thailand, and India.

However, despite China heavily promoting its high speed train technology around the world with a focus on Southeast Asia and Russia, there have been difficulties.

China is currently demanding compensation for a cancelled US$3.7bn high-speed rail scheme in Mexico, in which CNR was involved as a consortium member.

Negotiations for two new conventional rail lines in Thailand which Construction & Property Magazine reported on in Issue 13 have also encountered difficulties. The Thai government wants lower interest rates on the 20-year loan and is refusing to let Chinese firms manage the new lines resulting in demands from the Thai side to renegotiate the terms of the agreement.

China has yet to sell high-speed trains that run at 300 km/h anywhere outside China. The South China Morning Post reported Yu as saying that CNR faced challenges abroad that other companies didn’t. “The main challenges for us to expand in foreign markets are trade barriers, different manufacturing standards, diplomatic factors, higher fund-raising costs for Chinese companies as well as the inconvenience caused by our working visa limits,” the newspaper reported him as saying.