The Chinese blogosphere in particular was incensed: within a week more than 26 million tweets (or weibos, as they are called in China) had been posted, variously demanding help, excoriating the government, accusing propagandists of lying, and exposing underhand activity (such as the burying of the train cars, which were hastily dug up again, and official attempts to limit the victims’ rights to legal representation, a decision that was also suddenly reversed). Whatever the effect on the railway, the effect of the crash on the relationship between the grim men of the Politburo and China’s Web-connected citizenry has been massive.

And not surprisingly there are jitters. There were even before the crash. Just after Minister Liu’s dismissal Yoshiyuki Kasai, chairman of the Central Japan Railway Company, said, “I don’t think the Chinese are paying the same attention to safety that we are. Pushing it that close to the limit is something that we would never do.”

And the People’s Daily, the mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, published a remark by a railway engineer in Shaanxi Province last May, to the effect that he would refuse to ride on the high-speed trains—earning him an official party rebuke for “lacking courage.” The notion that one might require courage to ride on an express train is precisely what the fickle—and cost-conscious—Chinese traveling public does not want to hear. Especially when a ticket on a fast intercity train can cost, for an unskilled worker, up to a week’s wages: for him, fast must equate to convenient, and safe.

Journey’s End

By now the brakes were taking hold, doing so as silently as the rest of the operation of this remarkable train: the only way you could tell was by the descent in the speed indicator above the carriage door. Miss Huang was still smiling broadly, though I sensed now in slightly forced fashion, as she had just been told she would not stay overnight in the Chinese capital city, but would have to return to Shanghai that evening, and by a slower train, to be ready for the full-on service the next day.

She confessed to being a little downcast at not being able to spend time in her country’s capital. But she would be up again, I said, and soon. With an initial plan for 90 trains in each direction each day, and all of them probably—it is hoped—filled to bursting, she would have to employ and deploy her charms with a certain rigor, for sure, but as reward would get to see her capital very many times.

We stopped softly, as if we had run into a wall of goose down. The doors swished open, letting in a soggy carpet of hot stale station air. The girls all stood ramrod-straight, like the soldiers at Tiananmen Square, to bid us farewell. I said my good-byes, to Huang Yun most especially, and then edged out into the great river of the fast-departing crowds, walking steadily away from the ghostlike white express, the exterior of which even now was being swarmed over by a cleaning crew, all middle-aged women armed with squeegees and hand towels.

I found the exit gate and tried to put into its electronic slot my hard-won ticket from the morning. It was rejected, a horn sounded, and lights flashed angrily. “Mei-o,” said an official harshly, waving us away and down into a grubby corridor to another exit. “Not working.”

That first night off the train I spent in the China Club, an ancient courtyard house a mile or so from the station. It is a small 300-year-old mansion, all red lanterns and private courtyards and hanging silks and tapestries and dark bentwood furniture quite unchanged since the middle years of the Qing dynasty.

When the house was built, Chinese women’s feet were still bound, there were concubines and eunuchs, and if the emperor passed by, all subjects fell to the ground, performing the kowtow, daring not to gaze at the celestial presence. Yet back then China was seen in the burgeoning West as a place of seemingly little relevance on the world stage: a “booby nation,” Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, a nation good for the making of silk, ceramics, rhubarb, and tea, and little else.

How much has changed! For those of us who look on China from afar, the changes are dramatic and obvious. But, for the Chinese themselves, proud of their so ancient lineage and their cherished customs and traditions, they are surely experiencing change at such a rate that some can barely know who they are. More than a few must be mystified and bemused to be told to learn to smile by placing chopsticks between their teeth, and to stand up ramrod-straight, like foot soldiers in a strange new army, marching relentlessly but uncertainly—and now, on occasion, dangerously—into their uncharted future.