Chitchat China Abandoned Various Rail Projects

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An honorable member of the Coffee Shop Has Just Posted the Following:

China’s railway diplomacy hits the buffers
https://www.ft.com/content/9a4aab54-...4e5f1?mhq5j=e1


But less than two years after these hopeful words were uttered, a Financial Times investigation has found that China’s high-speed rail ambitions are running off the tracks. Far from blazing a trail for One Belt, One Road, several of the projects have been abandoned or postponed. Such failed schemes, and some that are under way, have stoked suspicion, public animosity and mountains of debt in countries that Beijing had hoped to woo.

The size of China’s grand design has made its many shortcomings all the more eye-catching. The combined value of cancelled projects in Libya, Mexico, Myanmar, the US and Venezuela is $47.5bn, according to FT estimates.

China Railway Corporation, the state-owned rail operator and investor in the country’s high-speed networks, has debts of Rmb3.8tn ($558bn), much more than the national debt of Greece. This is partly because much of the 22,000km of high-speed rail in China runs at a loss, officials say.

“The high-speed railway through Laos makes little economic sense,” says Murray Hiebert, Southeast Asia expert at CSIS. “China’s goal is clearly to find a land route to move goods from western China to mainland Southeast Asia. But with Laos’ small population and economy, little of this trade would stay in Laos and Laos would ship very little to China on the railway.”


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