The ambitious project of having the largest Chinese high-speed network in the world, and export their technology to other countries, has been hit hard in recent months to carve around it a web of corruption and scandal that has cost the head of the minister, Liu Zhijun.
Until earlier this year, China's high-speed rivaling the country's space program in prestige and prospects: China was developing the world's fastest trains, would take 10 years more miles of high speed (16,000) the rest of the world combined and obtained contracts in the U.S., Iran, Kazakhstan and Saudi Arabia to export its rail technology.
Sleep staggered in February when the Minister Liu was sacked for "severe violations of discipline", just days after he announced proudly that "darling" of their projects, high-speed line between Beijing and Shanghai, would create a year earlier than scheduled next June.
Soon after, the ministry's deputy chief engineer Zhang Shuguang, was dismissed for the same reason, while the business press began to uncover all sorts of scandals around the minister Liu, ultimately a peculiar character.
A Liu, 58, 18 are attributed lovers, some national television actresses, while his brother Liu Zhixiang, local leader's home province of both (Hubei) was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2006 for pay thugs to kill someone who had accused him of corrupt also.
addition to these lurid details, economic corruption was also beginning to come to light after the dismissal, especially when the newspaper China Business Journal said Liu system remained 2.5 percent of the money from each contract high speed.
economic problems of high-speed draft made official this week when the National Audit Office of China recognized that Beijing-Shanghai line had embezzled $ 28 million (20 million euros).
The scandals have spread a pall over the high speed plan China, which planned before the end of this five years to unite all the great cities of the country by this means of transport and "park" the aircraft as a means of transport between major distances.
The new Chinese Minister of Railways, Sheng Guangzu, had to leave the passage of these doubts, and said earlier this month at the annual session of National People's Congress (Legislative), projects would continue as set .
But not only cases of corruption threaten the continuity of these plans, also the massive debt that the Ministry of Railways (215,000 million euros, according to expert estimates.) And the limited audience of many of these trains, given its price, similar to airline tickets and even prohibitive for the average pocket Chinese.
High-speed trains such as the Guangzhou-Wuhan circulate often empty, and newspapers as the official "Global Times" earlier this month questioned whether the efforts to develop these lines respond to real needs of the market or rather movements increase the political prestige of the leaders local.
Chinese Railways, which manage each year the largest exodus of citizens of the world (hundreds of millions of people use the Spring Festival travel with their families) have been a source of pride government for decades, with deeds as the train to Tibet, the highest in the world, opened in 2006.
But in recent years, the prestige of the network has fallen, even before the corruption cases, as in 2008 suffered one of the worst accidents in recent decades (some forty dead in the Beijing-Qingdao route ) and a large collapse motivated by that winter snowfall that paralyzed the mentioned "brain" of the Spring Festival.
Chinese trains, however, expect a boost to your projects when in June the opening of the Beijing-Shanghai line, which will reduce the journey between the two main cities of the current 10 hours to four.
0 comments:
Post a Comment