China's high-speed railway network is by far the longest in the world. As of December 2022, it extends to 31 of the country's 33 provincial-level administrative divisions and exceeds in total length, accounting for about two-thirds of the world's high-speed rail tracks in commercial service. Over the past decade, China’s high-speed rail network grew rapidly according to ambitious railway plans issued by the State. The "Mid- to Long-Term Railway Network Plan" ("Railway Network Plan") approved by the State Council in 2004 called for of passenger-dedicated HSR lines running train at speeds of at least by 2020. The 2008 Revisions to the Railway Network Plan increased the year 2020 passenger-dedicated HSR network target length to and removed the 200 km/h speed standard to allow new lines to be built to standards that can accommodate faster trains.
Overview
In 2008, the Ministry of Railways announced plans to build of high-speed railways with trains reaching normal speeds of 350 km/h. China invested $50 billion on its high-speed rail system in 2009 and the total construction cost of the high-speed rail system is $300 billion. The main operator of regular high-speed train services is China Railway High-Speed (CRH).
China's conventional high-speed railway network is made up of four components:
a national grid of mostly passenger dedicated HSR lines (PDLs), other regional HSRs connecting major cities, certain regional "intercity" HSR lines, and other newly built or upgraded conventional rail lines, mostly in western China, that can carry high-speed passenger and freight trains.
National High Speed Rail Grid
"Four Vertical and Four Horizontal" network
The centerpiece of the MOR's expansion into high-speed rail is a national high-speed rail grid that is overlaid onto the existing railway network. The 2004 Railway Network Plan called for four lines running north-south (verticals) and four lines running east-west (horizontals) by the year 2020 that would connect population centers in economically developed regions of the country. The 2008 Revisions to the Railway Network Plan extended the length of the Beijing-Shenzhen HSR to Hong Kong and the Shanghai-Changsha HSR to Kunming. Each line in the 4+4 national HSR grid is over 1,400 km in length, except the Qingdao-Taiyuan Line which is 873 km in length. Apart from the Hangzhou–Shenzhen HSR (Ningbo-Shenzhen section) and Shanghai–Chengdu HSR (Nanjing-Chengdu section), which were the first railways to connect those cities and carry both passenger and freight, the other six lines are all passenger-dedicated lines. With the exception of the Yichang-Chengdu section of the Shanghai-Chengdu HSR with speed limits of , all other lines in the 4+4 national grid were built to accommodate trains at speeds of .
With the completion of the Beijing–Shenyang high-speed railway, this backbone network was fully completed in January 2021.
Completed lines Partially completed lines.
Four North-South HSR corridors and constituent lines
Four East-West HSR corridors and constituent lines
"Eight Vertical and Eight Horizontal" network
In 2016, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) announced the plans to extend the almost completed "Four Vertical and Four Horizontal" network to a new "Eight Vertical and Eight Horizontal" network. The new network comprises eight north-south ("vertical") corridors and eight east-west ("horizontal") ones, almost doubling the route length.
A corridor may consist of two or more parallel lines that take different routes between the same cities, branch and connector lines, and in some cases, connecting lines and lower-speed lines. The Beijing-Shanghai HSR corridor, one of the verticals, comprises the preexisting Beijing-Shanghai HSR, which runs through Tianjin, Jinan, Bengbu, Nanjing, Wuxi and Suzhou, as well as a new high-speed passenger dedicated line from Beijing to Shanghai via Tianjin, Dongying, Weifang, Linyi, Huaian, Yangzhou, and Nantong, as well as HSRs connecting Nanjing, Hefei and Shanghai with Hangzhou. Some corridors consist of a single HSR line; the Shanghai-Kunming HSR corridor, one of the horizontals, is essentially the Shanghai–Kunming High-Speed Railway by another name.
The national HSR mainlines in the 8+8 corridor grid are generally electrified, double-tracked, passenger-dedicated HSR lines built to accommodate train speeds of 250–350 km/h, but corridors also make use of intercity and regional HSR lines with speeds of 200 km/h as well as certain regular speed railways. The Qingdao-Yinchuan corridor includes the Taiyuan–Zhongwei–Yinchuan Railway, which is partially single-track with speeds of only 160km/h.