Beijing South railway station is a spanking new building, always crowded with passengers. Some, rushing for trains, hurriedly queue outside elevators, to head to the upper floors. Some others fish for a last minute bite in the string of ground floor eateries. Some of these restaurants typically offer noodle soup and dumplings, the staple for many Chinese travellers. For an international clientèle, or globe-trotting Chinese, there is always a Starbucks or Subway round the corner.

The presence of massive crowds is not surprising. The station is the hub of high-speed trains, the pride of China whose virtues are extolled by many, including Prime Minister Li Keqiang. China’s second most powerful man has established himself as the most high-profile brand ambassador of his country’s clean and efficient bullet trains. It is said that when the Prime Minister travels abroad, he carries with him a shiny model of a high-speed train.

After a quick security check, travellers at the Beijing station head into a vast hall, where giant screens, in English and Chinese, display arrival and departure schedules. The next step is to head for the appropriate airport-style departure gate, where railway staff, mostly women, usher passengers to the boarding platform.

It is here that the uninitiated can easily skip a heartbeat at the bold sight of gleaming off-white trains with conical space-age noses. Soon after departure, the trains easily clock an hourly speed of 300 km or a little above. Guangzhou, China’s coastal trade and manufacturing hub, at a distance of around 2,300 km from Beijing, can be reached in 9 hours. Shanghai, less than 1,350 km away, can be accessed in five hours. During the travel period, passengers can work on their laptops or tablets, listen to music or enjoy the scenery from their air-conditioned comfort. Better still, they have the option of moving into the more roomy dining area. The secret is to buy a pot of green tea, costing around 80 yuan (around ₹800). Many say this is not a heavy price for accessing a prized location, which has plenty of food and drink to offer, along with a cushioned seat, as well as a table — all ingredients of a perfect work station.

New entrant

Over the years, China’s high-speed network has been knitting the country’s political and economic heartland with its border extremities, such as Urumqi in Xinjiang in the west and Kunming in Yunnan towards the south-west. Everything else in-between has been threaded into this dense and rapidly mushrooming network of 22,000 km — the biggest in the world. Recently, China’s high-speed technology crossed another threshold, following the inaugural run from Beijing to Shanghai of the Fuxing train. Fuxing trains are capable of clocking 400 km an hour, using home-grown technology. “The Fuxing series will gradually replace the Hexie (harmony) bullet trains when they retire after an around 30-year life span,” Sun Zhang, a railway expert and professor at Shanghai's Tongji University, told the state-run tabloid Global Times.

China began to run Hexie trains, based on Japanese, German and French technology, in 2007. But a catastrophic accident in 2011 in Wenzhou, which killed 40 people, virtually grounded bullet train development in the country. The flagging of the Fuxing train is widely seen as a marker for the closure of the 2011 trauma. But it is also not without symbolism. Fuxing, in Chinese, means Rejuvenation. That dovetails with President Xi Jinping’s slogan of the “Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation”. Hexie, or harmony, in turn, has been associated with the bygone era of Mr. Xi’s low-key predecessor, Hu Jintao.