China has taken a foreign technology, indigenised it and scaled it up massively
cavernous factory of Dongfang Heavy Machinery Company , a state-owned firm based in Guangdong province, lies what looks like a suit of armour built for a mis-shapen giant. In fact, they are parts built to contain something even more fearsome—nuclear reactors and the high-pressure, high-temperature steam that they produce. Some are still being worked on.
A very similar story can be seen in the country’s high-speed-rail network, though with a telling interlude. China committed to high-speed rail, as to nuclear plants, under Deng Xiaoping in the early 1990s. But it started off down a home-grown technological dead end of trains which, instead of running on wheels, levitate above their track on magnetic fields. Engineers around the world had failed to make such systems work; Chinese engineers proved no exception.
For any technology that seems to meet a national need but faces right-of-way issues during its deployment, as high-speed rail does, or concerns about public safety, as nuclear does, there is no greater ally than the Chinese Communist Party. When 1m people in Hong Kong signed a petition against the construction of a nuclear plant nearby, a Chinese minister shut down their complaints by stating that “unscientific objections” would not stop the project.
Being a one-party state does not blind China to public concerns about safety. When 40 people died in a high-speed-train collision near the city of Wenzhou in 2011, the public was outraged. Passenger numbers fell; work on new lines was paused; safety procedures were scrutinised. There has not been a similar accident since.
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