Speeding to Wuhan at 349 km/h

It was also my only choice — Spring Festival travel madness has begun, and tickets for regular trains are only available one day in advance at the train station (or at higher prices from illegal ticket scalpers). When I got to the station, the only tickets available for the 12 hour train ride to Wuhan on regular trains were standing tickets. Even the Harmony Express, which has a separate booking system, was already sold out between the 5th and 11th — but luckily same-day tickets were still available when I finally reached the ticket-counter, after more than an hour in line in the crowded train station.

The train has only been running for a little over a month, but they’ve clearly put a lot of effort into making the ride a first-class experience. There were free water bottles at the train station, the train staff marched onto the platform in a perfect straight line, and everyone at the over-staffed train station was very friendly. When the train I was scheduled to take was delayed, the staff was thrown off script and put us on another train, which caused problems at the next stop when the passengers who had paid for tickets with the seat numbers we had been assigned boarded the train. But after 20 minutes or so of angry passengers fighting over the seats (and a few gallant passengers giving up their seats for others), the issue was finally worked out, and I got to ride in first class for the rest of the trip home (which, to anyone considering paying more for a first class ticket, wasn’t very different from second class).

A harmonious march to the platform

As for the name of the train, the phrase “harmonious society” is the catchphrase of the Hu Jintao administration, and can be seen everywhere, from advertisements in magazines to slogans painted on the walls in the city urging us to “build a harmonious society”. When controversial content is blocked or taken off major websites under government pressure, people say that it’s been “harmonized” (or “river crabbed”, which has a similar pronunciation). So for me, the word “harmony” has lost its positive ring. But I guess for a train that aims to be fast, comfortable and connect the country, I can live with having the word “harmony” tacked on in one more place.

In the taxi home from the train station, I asked the taxi driver how much the project had cost. More than 10 billion yuan just for the Wuhan station, he told me. I assumed I was translating the numbers wrong in my head, and checked it online: just the Wuhan station alone reportedly cost 14 billion yuan. A lot of money — but maybe as good a way as any to pump stimulus money into the economy (although there’s disagreement on whether or not the investment is sound), and definitely responding to a demand for more transportation infrastructure, especially at time like Spring Festival when the whole country is in motion. Although again, it’s hard to say if the Wuhan-Guangzhou route needed this the most — there were probably big kickbacks for whoever approved this project. But definitely a big plus for those of us who live in Wuhan, who through this and the new high-speed train to Shanghai can enjoy our new-found connectedness to the rest of China.

Transportation is a recurrent topic in my classes, and it’s one of the topics on which it’s the most clear that my students and I have vastly different opinions. I personally believe that Wuhan should deal with its traffic problem by putting in more buses, raising the tax on cars and gas to get them off the roads, and make it easier for people to get around by bike. My students, in general, think the city should build more roads. When we discussed this topic last week, it turned out that not a single one of my students own a bike — even though they live on university campuses, which should be the best candidates for bike-friendly locations. Instead, people buy a moped as soon as they can afford one, and then a car once they can afford that — and until then, they make do with buses. We do all agree that the subway (which is scheduled to be completed in a few years) will help, but given how much the city will have grown by the time it’s finished, it will probably just help the city to deal with rising pressure on the transportation system, rather than relieve the pressure that’s already there.

Even if the Wuhan city government did want to put in place policies to move people over to bikes and buses, it must be difficult to push that through when there seems to be such overwhelming public support for car-friendly policies. I’ll have to work harder to convince my students that more roads will make their commute worse, not better…