Development of Transportation in Communist China

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Abstract
Ambitious aspirations for railway development in China had long antecedents prior to the establishment of communist rule in 1949. During the First World War, Sun Yat-sen presented a programme calling for the construction of 100,000 miles of railroads. A quarter of a century later, in 1943, Chang Kia-ngau, Kuomintang Minister of Communications, presented a ten-year plan for railroad construction. He called for 14,300 miles of railroads to be built within ten years following the end of the war. The new lines he envisioned were to be added to a total of 12,036 miles of railroad which had been built by 1942. Of this meagre existing mileage, “3,726 miles were lost through the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and 6,566 miles were lost or destroyed during the first five-and-one-half years of the Sino-Japanese war.” While lines lost but not destroyed could presumably be utilised after the war, the scope of his programme, as can be seen from comparison with the existing mileage, was considerably beyond what China could hope to achieve with her own resources. Like Sun Yat-sen before him, Chang Kia-ngau hoped that massive conversion of Western war industries to the production of construction goods would provide the material inputs to make his programme feasible. A plan based on the expectation of a beneficence the West has yet to display to the underdeveloped world was of course foredoomed to failure.

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