Tracking change on Beijing’s subway
As a foreigner living longterm in China I have often faced the question: “You’ve seen tremendous changes during your time here. Which one impresses you most?” I was always at a loss to answer before I left Beijing, after living here for 12 years, in 2013. Yet one thing has hit me in the face since I returned a month ago: the Beijing subway.
The capital’s masstransit railway had just two lines when I first came here in 2001. As a native Londoner I must confess I regarded it with a mixture of condescension and nostalgia.
Nostalgia because here, I thought, was this quaint, backward system, designed by Soviet planners in the 1950s, on a mission to show their younger Chinese broth- ers how the Moscow subway had played a key role in the Russian capital’s heroic defense against the Nazi invasion of 1941.
Condescension, because my own London Underground was not just the world’s first subway, by a long way, when it opened in 1863. In 2001, it was still the biggest in terms of track length, and therefore I was convinced, the best.
By the time Russian engineers arrived to teach China about subway technology, a full century had passed since us Brits invented it. In 1855, just outside northeast England’s Newcastle, engineers dug a prototype tunnel to test an idea which many at the time considered harebrained. The first commercial service used steam-powered locomotives and gaslit carriages between London’s Paddington and Farringdon, a horrifying idea to anyone who knows about carbonmonoxide poisoning. By 1890, however, the technologies fathered by Britain’s greatest experimental physicist, Michael Faraday, had advanced enough for “the Tube” to start running on newly invented electric motors.
China went all out on subway building as part of a giant fiscal stimulus package to counter the effects of 2008’s financial crisis. Yeah, well they copied that from us too. My local section of the Piccadilly Line in west London opened in 1932. It was part of a big expansion of the network undertaken in reaction to the Great Depression, and enabled many Londoners to escape life in urban slums for the paradise of “invincible green suburbs”.
Today, of course, the track laid by Beijing has already firmly relegated the London metro to third-longest globally, with Shanghai slightly out in front to claim the top spot. In a few more years Beijing should have reached its full planned length of 999 km, leaving London’s 402 km far behind in the dust.
More importantly, Beijing is already three times as big as London by passenger volume. Over 10 million people now use it every day; about eight times as many as when I first arrived. The effect that moving so many people around must be having on the city’s economy, and on how Beijing’s urban landscape will develop in future, is mind-boggling.
Foreign media are fond of carping on about China’s white elephants; ghost cities and deserted megaprojects they present as proof of the failure of the country’s economic model. It will be interesting to see what level passenger density settles at once Beijing’s subway has expanded to its ultimate size. Confronted by consistently packed carriages today, however, from the point of view of this Londoner, it is truly impressive.