Why China has the Best Train Network in the World // 为什么中国有着世界上最发达的高铁网络

i've been feeling so small watch the clock ticking off the wall but tonight i'm letting go spend my coin for sure i'm gonna be in 2008 china opened its first high-speed rail line from beijing to its neighboring city tianjin 12 years later they've got over 30 000 kilometers of high-speed rail spreading all across china i'm currently going about 300 kilometers an hour on a fusing train and i can walk freely down the center without having to worry about falling over we're going to talk to you a day a little today a little bit about um the differences between the classes on this trains in china and we're going to talk to you a little bit about why we think china has been able to progress their high-speed rail track system so quickly [Music] welcome back to the barrett channel if this is the first video you are seeing from us we are here in china making a bunch of videos about different things around the country we take you to factories we take you around all the different cities we show you the culture and we talk about our experiences so if you're into that sort of stuff make sure you subscribe so you don't miss our videos so as you can see the main difference between economy class and first class is that you have a total of five seats across the train so you've got three on one side and then you've got two on the other which makes it so you you don't have a great deal of space you know i'm quite broad so it can be quite a problem for me sometimes however i would say that you do get a lot more space on the economy class on the train than you do on the economy class on most planes actually so it's quite a coincidence because we actually rode yesterday on the first ever high-speed rail track that was open in china which is from beijing to tianjin and uh now we are taking the train from tianjin down the east coast and there's going to be some beautiful views along the way because we're going pretty much along the coastline for five and a half hours to reach our destination it's insane china is so vast it's so huge and these trains make it so accessible to get around the country and it's very inexpensive as well which is a benefit in economy class you've got plenty of room for your luggage up at the top here and it doesn't look like ever anyone's ever sort of struggling to find a place for their luggage and they've also got at the end of each carriage they've got little areas for sort of bigger suitcases one thing that's worth noting is you still do have the ability to charge things in economy class although you have two spread between three seats so i guess most of the time that's not going to be a problem one thing that's actually better about the economy class is the tray table because in the first class your seat is so far in front of you that they actually have to opt for one that comes out of the side which is not very sturdy so actually you get a much better trade table and if you want to work on a laptop working on the economy class is actually a little bit easier in my opinion one of the things that we have to really keep in mind when we're on the road is how we're going to keep things juiced up because we've got so many different devices to be charging up all the time that's what i'm going to tell you this video is sponsored by anker they've given us two of these anchor nano charges that they are selling at the moment and it's literally solved all of our problems it's tiny you can see in relation to a part of my hand it literally just fits right into your pocket and this particular one is a usbc and uh for me i can just plug it in plug both sides into my phone we're good to go i don't have to worry about carrying some big brick in my pocket that's gonna take up a bunch of space and then i can literally simply sit back and be charging up on the way now i use an android but if you've got an iphone this nano charger is going to charge your phone three times faster than the standard iphone charger if you're somebody who travels around all the time like like we do you better be picking yourself up one because you're not going to regret it you won't even notice you've got it because it's that small and light so it's going to come in handy wherever you are anyway all the links will be down in the description thank you very much to anka for sponsoring this video we're about to go into the first class area now and let me show you how it differs so as you can see straight away you've only got two seats on either side and that allows for about i'd say about 20 30 extra shoulder width room which is always nice to have and you do have two very big spacious chairs the quality of the chairs is pretty much the same to be honest but then they do recline a huge amount if you do want to i had about a two hour sleep this morning because we got on this train so early so you can kind of let me show you you can lie back and sleep for a few hours and uh yeah i did that this morning as you can see this can is literally not moving in the slightest this is a beer as well i believe and it's made by a beer company but it's not a beer it's a soda water one thing you're getting in first class as well as you get this nice big sort of foot rest that you can whop out and put your feet on which is is always nice to have but it's not exactly something that i would spend the extra money on just for that purpose what they do as well in first class they also bring you around a bunch of different snacks and things as foreigners those snacks don't kind of sometimes they're not the best you know you get kind of like egg in a bag you get some other things that are not too appetizing for a lot of people but you know nevertheless it's nice to get the offer and you do also get brought around tea and coffee and things like that you get a bit of extra sort of service as to what you pay for here in the first class why do you reckon since 2008 china built 30 000 kilometers worth of high speed rail and we ain't got one in the uk yet in china it's not built to look to be profitable aware as they will or they will look at the profitability on a much more longer term basis and so they will build it and they might run it at a loss initially because they know that ultimately it will make the economy grow but that might take a long long time whereas in the uk they look to make profit very very quickly so the line take for instance there's some of the lines here they will probably never make money the one that goes from the center of china all the way up to xinjiang yeah that will probably never make money as a as a train line you know by the ticket sales but the benefit that has to the economy which obviously it's a lot more difficult to measure that so they put this infrastructure in because they know it will have positive effects on the economy as a whole they don't just look at it as how much money we can make on that train line and i think that's something that is lacking in the west i mean the the the fundamental reason for that is because it's it's a government initiative rather than private company initiative yeah it's government fund i mean if you look at in the uk um you know that the rail was privatized and pretty much most of it's been a bit of a disaster since they privatized it because you know the the private companies running to make money and not as a service too last time i was gone it's also extremely expensive i was about to say okay so to give you an idea i'm not quite sure how far this journey is but we're probably doing an average of 250 kilometers an hour for 5 00 so i would imagine it's somewhere 1300 1500 kilometers and we've paid 499 rmb for that journey which is about 55 to 60 pounds and that's first class now that that that carries a premium of about 35 percent of cyclists the second-class tickets are 330 rmb which is about 38 pounds 37 38 pounds and now if you compare that to a journey of that distance in the uk i'm sure it would be four to five times more last time i went back to the uk i took a journey that's probably 200 kilometers maximum and it cost me about the same amount of money and it took me about three hours to get there because you know obviously the trades are way slower and they're way more expensive so you can cover a way further distance here in china for less expensive and it's kind of a more comfortable journey as well it's it's a very comfortable deal i mean it's it's almost like being on an airplane they're very smooth they're very quiet i just want to address a couple of other things as well so just just a few statistics that um they they now have 35 000 plus kilometers of high-speed rail they're obviously phasing out more and more of the older rail and replacing the high speed rail and they have a target that by 2035 they want to have 70 000 kilometers of high speed rail and china currently has two-thirds that's more than 60 percent of the world's high-speed rail is it's kind of more than all the other countries put together and uh and again i i think that's down to that they see the economic benefits i mean you look at the the routes that are really busy like shanghai beijing you know those routes must be highly profitable yeah but they use the profit they make of that to subsidize less profitable lines and if you look over the last sort of 10 years how it's you know that the ridership has increased in 2019 people made 2.2 billion journeys just on the high speed rail network that is absolutely amazing consider there's only 1.4 billion people it's almost like two journeys per person so something else i'd also like to mention because i'm sure this will be leveled in the comments is that many people outside of china have this sort of notion that china stole the technology for for high speed and actually they didn't so if you go back to 2004 when um china first were putting out the tenders and contracts for high-speed rail they wanted 200 sets of high-speed rail trains built and that there was four companies that bidded in that tent so you had siemens of germany you had alstom of france you had bombardier and you had a japanese consortium led by kawasaki and out of those four companies all but one of them which was siemens were awarded um contracts now the reason why siemens didn't get included in the first round of contracts is they wanted too higher price for the transfer of technology they wanted 390 million euros for the transfer of that technology the other three companies agreed that when those contracts were fulfilled it would not only want trans be a transfer of technology to to chinese companies but a majority would would also be built within the chinese mainland to provide jobs for the chinese people and those contracts it was all agreed that that transfer of technology would happen and the chinese government paid a lot of money for that transfer of technology and interestingly what they did they didn't just say okay we'll have that technology we'll build trains they improved on that technology significantly and that's why today we now have those first trains that they procured under those contracts were were running at like 200 kilometers an hour and they they improve massively on that technology so today we have this we're on the fusing train which is one of the best high-speed rail trails in china at the moment which can go i believe up to 300 but then you've got the newest ones which are like the maglev trains which i haven't traveled on yet no i think there's some some of the high speed trains now that that do in excess of 300 kilometers i think they're specs up to 350 kilometers an hour so they've built on this technology and the next generation which they're now testing will do up to 600 kilometers an hour that's crazy you know and that that's just going to make such a difference on on the sort of lines that are frequently used like the beijing to shanghai and lines like that so i just wanted to give you a bit of a sort of background because you know it is i feel unfair the way many people outside of china say that china stole the technology in fact they didn't they paid a lot of money for that technology and in those contracts those companies knew very well what they were signing a contract for well there's the facts i want to go and show you a little bit about business class because we've seen economy we're in first and i'll just give you a little overview of what business is like now one of the first videos on our channel was actually taking the business class train here in china so don't check that video out if you've seen that already let me know down in the comments as well because that was seriously one of the first videos on our channel so it brings back memories watching that but have a look at this business class is almost like a bit of a spaceship you've got really really spacious seats here only three per cabin obviously no one's in here at the moment it is quite expensive it comes in at three times the price of economy class so this journey we paid 499 in first class and this was like 936 which is about 100 pounds in business class which is the best class you can get here in china but yeah you get a nice big comfortable leather seat you get slippers you get you know a reclining chair that you can actually fold flat so you can actually sleep like you're in a bed and other than that you know you have a reading light you have a few little amenities that the the staff come and bring you and it's a very nice and small carriage as well that's another thing so it'll be quite quiet you wouldn't want us in here filming because obviously we make a lot of noise anyway that is us done on the bullet train here in china i really hope you did enjoy this video it seems people liked us to show these bullet trains here in china because you know many other countries don't have them if you did enjoy please do drop a thumbs up thank you very much in advance for doing so drop a comment down below if you've ever tried out the bullet train in china or in another country like japan i'd be very interested to know we will see you your beautiful faces in the next video for now everybody take care [Music] you

Channel: Barrett

Views: 590,151

Keywords: barrett, barrettyt, china, culture, travel vlogger, china vlogger, oli barrett, lee barrett, the barretts, 中国, 外国人, 中国大陆, 英国人, 老外, 旅行, 文化, 旅游, bullet train, high speed train, china bullet train, first class bullet train, chinese train, chinese high speed train, china high speed trains, chinese business class, high speed train china, china high speed rail, chinese bullet train, china high speed railway, bullet train china, first class bullet, bullet train first class, china train

Id: 6FTA1CdMrGs

Length: 16min 21sec (981 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 07 2021