China’s high-speed rail ambitions are running off the tracks, the Financial Times reports in a special investigation that draws from Reconnecting Asia’s database. Several projects have been suspended or canceled, “stoking suspicion, public animosity, and mountains of debt.”
The guiding principle of the Trans-Siberian Railway was not about the routine moving of people from place-to-place, but sticking a pair of iron rods into bleak territory that had strategic importance in defining Russia’s role in the Far East.
Quotes and Quotas is a weekly digest of phrases and facts that help explain Asia’s infrastructure push.
Nowhere other than India is the railway so indelibly connected with the image of the nation. Just as there is no single country on earth that has such a broad cultural, ethnic, and racial mix as India, there is also no railway system that has played and, crucially, continues to play such a fundamental role.
Our “Big Questions” series brings together leading scholars, former policymakers, and top industry experts to tackle critical questions. In the sixth part of this series, we asked a group of experts the following: