I can't believe how Europe, Australia and pretty much everywhere else people believe the propaganda about China's supposedly amazing railway network and rolling stock industry, shared all over the place by the dictatorship's business initiatives.
It hurts my soul to defend Alstom, Siemens or Stadler but if you every looked closer to a CRRC train, you will soon understand how European rolling stock is decades ahead of what China builds.
Let me explain and start with the economics.
- Westbahn ordered 15 Stadler KISS trains for 300 mio EUR (20 mio per trainset)
- Westbahn leased four CRRC DDMU02 trains for 70 mio EUR for a period of 10 years including maintenance (18 mio EUR per trainset)
- Leo Express ordered five Stadler FLIRT trains for 60 mio EUR (12 mio per trainset)
- Leo Express ordered 30 CRRC Sirius trains for 200 mio EUR (7 mio per trainset)
We keep hearing how European manufacturers cannot compete with Chinese prices. Yes, the trains are cheap and the overall offers good - but there is definitely no unreasonable price gap. And all that despite CRRC as a state-owned enterprise profiting from any kind of financial and political support, humans rights violating exploitation in the employees and large scale forced labor in the supply chain.
But if we compare the prices, it's not such a huge difference. The key factor is rather the delivery time : As a Chinese state company, the priority is always supplying foreign offers first in hope to permanently establish a supply chain. Therefore, CRRC can immediately start building newly ordered trains - a lure offer to establish China on international markets.
So far the business side.
Let's talk about the rolling stock itself.
As a brief history, CRRC was established from the so-called "Harmony" (Hexie) initiative of China's dictatorship regime. Hexie refers to the first generation of Chinese high-speed trains built by European and Japanese companies locally in China using technology-transfer. This way, CRRC got all the knowledge from Alstom, Bombardier, Kawasaki and Siemens to develop their own future trains.
Chinese trains are incredibly fast and amazing press pictures, mock-ups and even prototypes carrying the narrative of comfortable, modern and affordable trains dominate the western view on Chinese railways. These narratives are repeated, prayed over and over with no evidence.
Yes, trains are fast. That's it. CRRC has combined and improved the foreign technology to operate at higher speeds of 350 - 400 kph. The rest of it is propaganda. The trains technology is not advanced. The trains are bumpy, unoptimized and shaky - even on the most modern tracks at medium speed. The hardware is unreliable, everything is optimized on low cost, neither on safety nor on quality and sustainability.
Despite that, railways are incredibly expensive in China. They are configured in budget airline style with the cheapest interior possible in 1st and 2nd class. The exception is the business class (surprise : That's what the propaganda machine feeds to the international news). While we believe the song of affordable railways accessible to everyone, tickets here are at the same price and often more expensive than on the flagship high-speed networks in Europe - absolutely unaffordable for the average Chinese citizen who's not living a privileged higher class life.
I don't know why we all believe this, but seeing western companies falling into the trap of CRRC's lure offers for cheap trains is entirely incomprehensive to me. Chinese rolling stock is not the long awaited new wind for modern and affordable railways but a pitfall into the scrapyard of deprecated, crappy and unthoughtfully built rolling stock covered by a beautiful mask and pipe dreams.
Crappy trains sold at over expensive prices despite the dictatorship's government subsidies, cruel exploitation of the workers and forced labor in the supply chains.
China is not just a business partner with another culture. It's a cruel dictatorship putting all effort in propaganda, business and dependency of the western world.
If we're serious about railways, about liberty and human rights, we buy rolling stock in democratic countries with worker's rights, independent human rights organizations and real innovation in building trains.
China is not an alternative source of rolling stock but a cruel dictatorship eliminating its own population in concentration camps and supporting slavery through forced labor to reach its economic power.
All information in this post was researched at best effort. I'm not a train manufacturer not an economist or human-rights expert. I'm just an individual concerned about what's happening. Especially the human-rights situation in China is hard to proof due to the absolute surveillance and repression against anyone speaking up.
Cynically, I wrote this post while traveling aboard of a 
CR400AF-Z train in China.
#China #CRRC #Railways #Souvereignity #HumanRights
