VARIOUS EASTERN LOCALES, China — Relative velocity's a hell of a thing. It's impossible to conceptualize how fast 300 kilometers per hour is until you're on a train that fast. Even then, it's primarily visual: Until you look at the window and briefly shock the brain with parallax, a G-class high-speed rail train runs so smoothly that you may as well be held still in space. Then, another train runs in the opposite direction on the adjacent track, and in those few seconds that they pass one another, you can feel it: the brief moment when you go from 300 kilometers per hour in one reference frame to over 500 kilometers per hour in another.
The math is, at least, a little easier. To drive from Beijing to Rizhao would take roughly seven hours without traffic, over 400 or so miles. The G-class train we took a day after arriving in Beijing, a Fuxing train produced by state-owned rolling stock manufacturer CRRC, made the trip in about four very comfortable hours, much of which I spent on Wikipedia. (The new CR450 rolling stock, designed for operating speeds of 400 kilometers an hour, is expected to enter service this year. CRRC also has a subsidiary based in Massachusetts, with a rather unfortunate record when it comes to delivering on its contracts with various American urban metro systems, like the MBTA and SEPTA.)
To hear my mother describe it, Rizhao is a little podunk town that's never encountered the concept of a foreigner. Official counts of the full prefecture-level city population include the surrounding rural areas, but the pure metro area still has a population of over a million people. Still, it's not a hot spot, especially compared to the nearby Qingdao and the less nearby Jinan, which doesn't bar Rizhao West Station from being a high-speed rail line stop, connected to a network that patterns the entire country. Other than the rules of geometry, it’s where a rail network far outstages any automobile or airplane. Get to a train station, even in Rizhao, and then you can go anywhere.
There is some concern over my and my sister's functional illiteracy, but there's not much to do in rural Rizhao. My family makes last-minute, low-communication plans with stunning aplomb. A few hours after my mother tells my cousin about the plan for my sister and me to explore Qingdao alone for a week, my cousin's husband has already booked us new hotel tickets for a couple of nights in Huangdao, and we are sitting in their car to head off to hot pot. My cousin's husband spent the first two days shuttling us around the city via car, first to the waterfront of Huangdao and various beaches, and then to Laoshan. Exploration of Qingdao proper was left for after, when we were finally able to ride the metro.
In Qingdao, I developed a new bit, which was repeatedly saying, "Wow, this is just like San Francisco." Similarities: fog, bay, big bridge, constant mid-to-high-60s temperature that feels much warmer directly under the sun. Differences: population, density, cost of living, and the quality of the transit system, which, in Qingdao, did not exist 10 years ago. Now there are eight lines serving a metro population of over 7 million people, with multiple extensions and four more lines under construction. In 2023, the metro had an average daily ridership of 1.3 million people; this does not include bus ridership, which covers areas where the metro is still incomplete.
Unlike other Chinese transit systems, whose transit cards can be activated and used via QR code on payment apps like Alipay, the Qingdao Metro has a separate app which requires a Chinese phone number to activate, and a passport scan to connect an external payment option like Alipay. There are also ticketing stands for physical cards and single-ride tickets at every station, though the app trades the hassle of rebuying or preloading money in return for using a somewhat slow-loading QR code to tap in and tap out. Other than standard payment hijinks, the subway—color-coded, signposted—is easily navigable, even for the functionally illiterate. Both Apple Maps and the Chinese standard of 高德地图/Amaps work well for navigation; the former, at least in English, only has Pinyin, while the latter only has Chinese.
A metro is good when two transfers are a minor ask; it feels great when a transfer from one line to another is built so that you only have to cross the platform. The subway stop leading back to our hotel also outlets into the mall across the street. Thanks to clearly named entrances/exits and in-station wayfinding, it was easy enough to head toward Exit C and then branch off a little earlier into a Muji. I know what you're thinking: This is just like how the SEPTA El leads directly into Market Place East on 8th Street! As someone who has tried both, I can tell you that these experiences are exactly parallel.
With our mishmash of speaking English to each other, plus good Chinese comprehension, fluent Chinese speech, and functional illiteracy, my sister and I conjured up multiple speculations as to our provenance—never Chinese American and instead mapped onto the geography-enabled tourist demographics wherever we were: Korean in Qingdao, and Singaporean in Shanghai—but nevertheless somehow projected such an air of train-related confidence that on two out of the three occasions we were waiting at the gate to board the train, some elders came up and asked us to confirm some information. (Likely it was less to do with any train-related confidence on our part and more to do with us standing in the "human-assistance" line due to our non–Chinese resident status.)
My cousin's wife bought tickets for us whenever we needed them, so the actual ticket-buying process is a little obfuscated for me. What I do know: Tickets do not become available until three weeks before the trip. There is assigned seating. A return trip from Qingdao North station to Rizhao West station on a Saturday afternoon, which takes an hour, cost ¥57 when purchased a few days in advance. Foreign travelers who are not Chinese residents are required to have their passports manually checked, both when passing through initial station security, and at the ticket scanning gates to get onto the train.
Even with the built-in slowdown of station security, a mildly delayed subway trip to the station that required a transfer, and some confusion upon exiting the subway—from what we experienced, the subway did not connect directly to the train station—we made it to the gate with about 30 minutes to spare. This train was another G-class one, though an older model than the one we rode from Beijing that never hit top operating speed on the journey. The second time at Rizhao West station gave us some familiarity with the layout and the character 乘; it was plenty easy to navigate to where my cousin came to pick us up.
According to my second cousin once removed (my maternal grandmother's younger brother's son), the actual geographical location of my aunt's house meant that we could've ridden the West Coast Line all the way southwest to Dongjiakou station—closer to Rizhao's city center than Qingdao's—and gotten picked up there, for overall less travel time. Ah, well. Nevertheless. What's one inefficient transportation route in the face of an extra high-speed rail ride?
The final high-speed rail train we rode was, in terms of high-speed, the slowest: a D-class train going from Rizhao West to Shanghai Hongqiao Railway Station. The numbers: 250 km/hr top service speed, across another 400 or so miles further south. It was our first time riding a train that did not originate from the station we boarded at, and thanks to assigned seating, boarding at the platform was more or less straightforward, even with a stressful suitcase situation. I gave into impulse and took a video of the train as it pulled into the station, which means I caught the model for the foamers out there: a Fuxing CR300AF.
Arriving in Shanghai four hours later was a separate affair. Too many bodies offloading at once, not enough time for a picture. Except for the passengers who stepped off the train and immediately pulled to the center of a platform in order to smoke a cigarette, everyone crowded to the escalators and stairwells. Following signage in the station led directly down to the Shanghai metro, the highest ridership rapid transit system in the world, a fact that comes secondary to that system also happening to have a little mascot named Changchang who does safety PSAs on screens in the trains and wears some real stylish red Jordans.
The Shanghai metro had the most precise live timing screens I've seen, with estimated arrival times down to the second. I would not consider that choice of significant figure to be warranted, though points must be given for ambition. Speaking of: One of the current expansion goals for the Shanghai metro would be for every location in the center of the city to be within 600 meters of a station, or roughly half a mile, by 2025.
Ride one Chinese metro system, and you get a feeling for the rest. This is not so much a cultural manifestation as it is literal: The development of metros in China is highly standardized nationwide, enabling the sort of rapid expansion that can produce a metro system with 1.3 million daily riders in under 10 years of existence, or this ludicrous expansion map of the Chengdu metro. It means that you don't get certain city-specific quirks like, say, the existence of PATCO, but can expand at a scale and speed that would be impossible so long as contracts for rolling stock are bid on every time a new fleet is needed.
This isn't to say that the Shanghai metro doesn't have its own unique character. Beyond different AC levels on train cars, a friend of my mother showed us a video of architecturally impressive stations that people will go to just to take photos there. This is not behavior I would ever engage in; the only reason why I'd go out of my way to a particular train station is if there's a maglev museum to visit.
Here's a real cultural phenomenon: People in China do not walk on escalators.
There are metal detectors and bag scanners in both Chinese train stations and subway stations. Subway station security gave the same impression as mannequins dressed in police clothes or a fake police car with its lights on at the side of a highway, a sort of deterrent signaling more than any concrete safety measure. Security at major train stations was more serious than at subway stations, and shared some of the broader mechanics of airport security, though it was still quicker and far less involved than boarding an airplane.
In "The Global Rise of the Militarizing Metro," written in the aftermath of Eric Adams's proposal to add metal detectors to subway stations in New York City, Seung Lee tracks the history of increased surveillance and militarization in international metro systems. Beijing became one of the first cities to employ full-time metal detectors in the lead-up to the 2008 Olympics, an initiative reinforced after the 2014 Kunming attack; every major Chinese city has since followed suit. Your sentiments on the tradeoffs between security and surveillance in subways and train stations will likely cleave close to your opinions on the global airport security theater post-9/11.
I spend an above-average amount of breath in my day-to-day life declaring that I am not a foamer, which is not out of a desire to separate myself from the connotations of the term, but because I think I wouldn't qualify: I don't like trains that much on their own merit, though I guess I'll take a short video of one if I get the opportunity. The thing about transit that I get sentimental over is still the basic belief in a collective, life-changing good for moving people from one place to another.
At least three separate conversations my mother had with one of my cousins during our prolonged stay in Rizhao came to the same conclusion: The 农村 is dying. Fewer and fewer young people are coming back to the countryside. With that value proposition in mind, in recent years, a multi-lane street called Beijing North Road was paved, connecting a swath of villages, including my uncle's, to the city. A bus with a flat fare of ¥3, the 305, reliably runs down the street every 20 to 25 minutes. It took about an hour for us to take a day trip down to Rizhao proper and run errands in a city, where a young woman at the post office told us with abject seriousness that a letter my sister was trying to mail back to the United States might get lost. (The letter eventually made it a month later. The glorious postal service prevails!)
Any idea that surveillance or policing can make transit cleaner and safer can never match the efficacy of investment into infrastructure that actually makes transit reliable and cleaner and safer: increased frequency and three-minute headways, automatic track barriers, regular cleaning, public restrooms. All of which requires dedicated funding, political commitment, and a belief that transit is a shared, public necessity, as much as it is a good. Of course, the existence and convenience of a bus line like the 305 doesn't imply that constant surveillance becomes easier to stomach. One would like to imagine a subway ride as a space where everyone trusts each other; a metal detector and a bag scanner remind you that someone on high does not.
The station for the Shanghai Transrapid—better known as the Shanghai maglev train—has a cute free-admission museum right by it, which explains the history and technology of the line. The line used to operate at 431 kilometers per hour, though recently scaled down the speeds to operate a 300 kilometers per hour instead; the museum has not updated to reflect this fact. Magnetic levitation in transit exists at the AM/FM border between Actual Machine and Fucking Magic: a heavily researched and functioning technology that has yet to be implemented at any meaningful commercial scale.
The Shanghai Transrapid is a commercial line, but still a novelty one. The price of a ticket is ¥50, discounted down to ¥40 if you possess a same-day airplane ticket. Though the considerably less exotic subway line leading from that same station to the airport cannot get you there in seven minutes, it is much less expensive.
If you have ridden a G-class high-speed rail train, you have some frame of reference for what 300 kilometers per hour feels like. It looks different when there's an urban environment passing by the window, or when the train has to physically tilt in order to turn—a kind of magic, certainly, though just one among many.
Toward the end of our stay in Shanghai, I started trying to stand on the subway without needing to hold onto anything. This perhaps sounds more impressive than it is: The Shanghai metro runs so smoothly that it only takes a couple of rides to figure out the trick. You stand parallel to the train's direction and let your body's weight go from one foot to the other; as it turns, you can lean forward and back to compensate. Feel it out a little bit, and then you're there—floating, and it doesn't take very much effort at all.
