During our previous visits to Beijing, more or less once a year since 1999, we have always observed the constant decrease in bicycles in the Chinese capital.
Whilst there might have been nine million bicycles in Beijing 20 years ago, automobile ownership in Beijing is now at 4.7m cars, with 6.2m registered drivers; during our visit to the city this time we hardly saw a bike!
In 2010 alone 670,000 new motor vehicles entered the roads in Beijing, literally squeezing out the last few bikers from the roads, and contributing to congestion and pollution.
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We recently had the pleasure of taking the new 120km high-speed rail connection between Beijing and Tianjin, the second largest city in Northern China. The line was finished just prior to the Beijing Olympics in 2008, cutting the travelling time between the two cities from 70 to 30 minutes, with speeds reaching 335km / hour.
The Beijing- Tianjin high speed rail line is part of China’s USD 300bn investment plan in a nationwide high-speed passenger-rail network. The plan was accelerated following China’s stimulus package from November 2008, with some USD 100bn of the USD 586bn stimulus package being allocated to high speed rail; on top of what was already planned.
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In December 2010 we spent a day in the outskirts of Tianjin searching for empty apartments and the Chinese housing bubble. We have previously been advocating that China’s massive loan growth and credit expansion over the last few years, combined with a steep personal savings rate, have resulted in rapidly accelerating housing prices and an explosion in construction activity in China. What we found in Tianjin was that construction activity was centred increasingly to the peripheral outskirts of the city centre; to bigger and larger projects, with a big question mark to when the developments will be fully occupied.
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May 10, 2011 10:35 am | 
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