By Li Hong, People's Daily Online

Fast-growing economy should run on fast wheels. That the world has lapsed into a grave recession in more than 50 years provides a chance for China, which is flush with capital and manpower, to lay the ground work for the world's fastest-running trains. As the country weighs, consistently and irrevocably, on new energies and new technologies, an advancing zigzag and circle of a national bullet train network shall assist China to take off even higher.

The Keynesian economics says that if one has a weak economy, such as China's in 2008 and 2009 when its traditional reliance on export shipments was crippled, the government should stand up and spend. Beijing's US$586 billion stimulus plan includes heavy spending on a high-speed rail system. Pundits believe that just as the transcontinental railroad revised America's economic geography when it was built, the brand-new rail system will do the same for China. Now China has the fastest-running trains in the world. When completed, the fast rail will leave this country in a solid position for fast and sustainable growth in the century.

The completion of the first-phase nationwide expressway system around 2005 has elevated China from a snail-moving agrarian society to one driven by two propellers of manufacturing and faster mobility. However, as decimating weather patterns occasionally visit China, such as in this winter season, traffic would generally snarl and clog as up to 100 miles-long trucks were packed on the highways for days. So, it is a wise decision for the country to gear up for a rail revolution.

Just prior to the opening of the 2008 summer Olympic Games in Beijing, a fast track came to operation linking China's capital with neighboring port city of Tianjin. With trains capable of traveling by more than 350 kilometer per hour, the previous one-hour-long journey is reduced to 25 minutes. After that, the 10-hour travel from Guangzhou to Wuhan, central China, has been shortened to three. The trip from Shanghai to Beijing, currently clocks in at 10 grueling hours, will be reduced to just four once the new line comes into use in 2011, making train travel between the country's two most important cities a viable competitor to air for the first time.

And, it is just a tip of an iceberg. Beijing has a giant plan to invest 3,800 billion yuan on high-speed rail over the coming five years, to extend its network by up to 20,000 kilometers connecting nearly all provincial cities and moving people and freight on the fastest tracks in the world. In addition, to relieve large cities of amounting surface traffic during work days, more than 20 cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenyang, Nanjing and Xi'an are tunneling underground, in their bids to build the longest metro system in the world.

Economists believe that the country's immense input into rail will fill in the blank done by the Great Recession, nudge up domestic demand and create jobs for the migrant workers. The government has said that the Shanghai-Beijing High-speed Railroad has delivered 500,000 urgently needed jobs. The massive investment into rail and other fields has averted an otherwise sluggish economy.

The advent of high-speed trains is likely to have even greater implications for China, in addition to phasing in one of the world's most advanced infrastructure that lays the groundwork for further development, exploration and commerce. By making rail travel, relatively cheaper compared to air travel, available to ever larger groups of people, the high-speed trains will not only change physical distances, but individuals' perceptions of their own limitations.

It will prove to be an eye-opener for the young people who haven't got a chance to see large cities like Beijing and Shanghai. Once enlightened and encouraged, their closet minds are to be opened and their potential will be put into full use. Also, the talented minds and adventurous entrepreneurs in the east will choose to move to China's underdeveloped west hinterland, as the journey to the inner land mass is made "less remote" by the high-speed trains. Gradually, the gaps of knowledge and wealth between the more urbanized east and the mostly rural west will be narrowed.

So, a rail revolution undertaken in China will gain the country a position it has not attained in history. And, the revolution will be learnt by others.