Belt and Road Tycoon: a game helping you to know more about the CR
- Wei Jia/Zhao Shan
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E-mail China.org.cn, 04 29, 2019
During his keynote speech at the opening ceremony of the Second Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation held in Beijing on Saturday, Chinese President Xi Jinping said that China will increase imports of goods and services on a larger scale.
One important part of that heightened effort is railway transportation.
The CHINA RAILWAY Express (CR Express) is a freight train service between China and Europe. Launched in March 2011, the service had connected 60 Chinese cities with 50 cities in 15 European countries by the end of February this year.
Over 14,000 trains enable the transportation of commodities between Chinese cities such as Chongqing, Chengdu, and Wuhan and European cities such as Duisburg, London, and Madrid, the most distant European city the railway network services.
The CR Express is a major part of the Belt and Road Initiative, an ambitious idea first proposed by Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2013 to improve regional cooperation and connectivity on a trans-continental scale. The CR Express has been gathering momentum since 2016, with a string of remarkable year-on-year growths in the number of trips the trains made. The service logged 6,363 trips in 2018, for example: a 73 percent increase from 2017.
The popularity of the rail network has a lot to do with its unique advantage compared with air and maritime transport. Significantly cheaper than air transport, rail transport between Chinese and European cities takes about one third the time of waterborne transport and is not affected by inclement weather that could disrupt the schedule of cargo ships.
Electronic products, machinery, and clothing are popular goods transported from China to Europe, while cars, auto parts, wood, beverages, and alcohol are carried in the opposite direction.
In 2018 China (11 %) was the second largest partner for EU exports of goods and the largest partner for EU imports of goods (20 %). Although rail transport was only involved in 2% of China-Europe trade at the end of 2018, the way the CR Express is growing, it could develop into a much more widely used means of transport to facilitate the trade between China and Europe, especially as the Belt and Road Initiative brings the two even closer.
