China's Transport Problem, and Communist Planning

Abstract

]r T has been a commonplace to prescribe extension of low-cost volume transport facilities as a solution to China's economic dilemma. Perhaps more than any other factor, inadequate transportation was responsible for the slow pace and small accomplishments of China's industrialization and of the Westernization of the economy until 1949, though governmental weaknesses must share a good deal of the blame. Clearly, effective change in any sector of the country's economic life still must depend on the existence of a transport network which enables a large volume of goods to move cheaply within a unitary national market. Until 1949, a railway net totalling some 6000 miles (exclusive of Manchuria, which will not be treated here) was largely confined to the eastern lowland. Eight of the 18 provinces had no railways at all, and four others had less than 200 miles each (Fig. 1). The great majority of this mileage had been built by foreign capital and technicians, and the products of foreignowned mining and industrial enterprises accounted for a large proportion of the goods carried. Motor roads suitable for lightly loaded truck traffic did not exceed 100,000 miles, again concentrated in the eastern lowland. The costs of truck transport remain very high, as a reflection of fuel and equipment problems. Water transport, the only other volume mover at present, has long been highly developed in China and still carries most of the goods which move over any considerable distances, but it is handicapped by inefficient operation, especially for bulk or volume movements, and by the fact that waterways reach only part of the productive areas of the country. Despite the beginnings; of industrialization and the Communist program of railway building, China is still characterized by a high degree of regional self-sufficiency. In many areas, transport by the only available means doubles the cost of the goods within fifty or a hundred miles. Even with the advantage of the Yangtze system, Szechuan wheat often sold in the 1930's in Shanghai for over three times its price in Szechuan. Coal at the pithead in Shansi cost $5 (Chinese National Currency) per ton in the 1930's, while at Shanghai 500 miles away it sold for $12 a ton.' At the pioneer Chinese iron and steel works of Hanyehp'ing at flanyang on the Yangtze, coking coal was brought 300 miles by water and rail from P'inghsiang; delivered, it ac-