General engineering situation
As an exemplary industry that represents the transformation and upgrading of China’s manufacturing industries, the high-speed rail industry has advanced and surpassed developed countries all over the world. This achievement resulted from the introduction, absorption, and indigenous innovation on the leveraging of core technologies and relevant engineering innovation systems. Moreover, China’s high-speed rail industry has become a great name card on China’s high-end equipment “going-out.” Taking the statistical data of 2015, China’s total railway length has reached 121000 km, and the operating length of the high-speed rail has reached 19000 km, covering more than 60% of the total length of the world’s high-speed railways and 16% of the total railway length of the country. In addition, the performance of China’s high-speed rail is leading the world standard among diverse dimensions (Table 1).
Landscape of high-speed rail industry’s evolution
China’s high-speed rail industry has experienced longitudinal evolution. Table 2 summarizes the key events that present the evolution of high-speed rail development.
Major innovations of China’s high-speed rail
High-speed train: From introduction and absorption to indigenous innovations
The Ministry of Railways began the introduction, absorption, and re-innovation strategy for the development of China’s high-speed rail industry. In addition, they made the strategic principal on “introduce the advanced technologies, joint design and production, and build the indigenous high-speed rail brand the of China.” Thereafter, with the coordination of the Ministry of Railways, CSR and CNR played as the two major actors that promote collaborations with four global partners on joint innovation of high-speed trains.
After two rounds of introduction of global high-speed train, the Ministry of Railways started to support the indigenous innovation of high-speed trains. Focusing on the CRH380 indigenous innovation goals, the central government issued science and technology research projects that embrace all the key players among the domestic high-speed rail industry, involving 25 universities, 11 research institutions, 51 national laboratories, 68 academicians, and more than 700 professors. The first indigenous EMU CRH380 at 350 km/h speed level finally came into operations in 2010 (Fig. 1), with the 9 core technologies (e.g., EMU system assembly, car body, bogie, traction transformer, main converter, traction motor, traction drive control system, train control network system, and brake system) and 10 complementary technologies (e.g., air-conditioning system, toilet, door, window, windshield, hooking device, flow receiving device, auxiliary power supply system, interior decoration materials, and seats) fully innovated indigenously.
Engineering construction of high-speed railway
To trigger the development and success of China’s high-speed rail industry, the central government promotes the domestic construction of high-speed railway network. The start of the country’s railway network construction, which approved “Medium- and Long-Term Railway Network Planning,” was in early 2004; the construction targeted building high-speed passenger-dedicated railway line with total length of 12,000 km, covering four vertical and four horizontal lines. In July 2016, the updated plan formulated an even larger blueprint of domestic high-speed railway network upon “eight vertical and eight horizontal” plan, with the total length increasing to 30000 km in 2020, covering 80% of big cities in China.
Engineering on bridges and tunnels
The powerful engineering and manufacturing of bridges and tunnels are necessary to complete the major high-speed railway line and cover complex terrain differences among diverse regions, such as mountains, desert, hills, plains, and basins. Representative bridge and tunnel engineering projects are described in Table 4.
World leader of innovative enterprises: CRRC
CRRC was merged by the oligopoly players CSR and CNR at the end of 2014 and became the world’s most competitive enterprise in high-speed rail industry. Tracing to the strategic evolution of CRRC, CRRC focused on the improvement of core competence and the development of innovation system. At the initial stage of CSR before 2004, it mainly concentrated on the integration and reconfiguration of existing resources. Thus, CSR enhanced the high-valued resources that cover in domestic high-speed rail industry, thereby constructing the basic competence pools for developing high-speed rail industrial goals. When China began the “introduction, absorption, and re-innovation” strategy to drive the high-speed rail industry, CSR positioned its strategy on enhancing the core competence via the introduction, absorption, learning, and re-innovation of high-speed technologies. CSR accelerated the leveraging of its own competitiveness via the investment of financial capitals and management system construction to promote the advancement toward the global innovative incumbents. Early in 2008, China transformed its high-speed rail industrial strategy into indigenous innovation. As a result, CSR shifted its strategic focus to indigenous R&D and the development of high-speed train brand CRH380, resulting in the construction of its global core competitiveness. Finally, the establishment of CRRC witnessed China’s global leading enterprise in high-speed rail industry. CRRC began to output its indigenous technologies, high-speed train products, solution services, and manufacturing capabilities all over the world, thereby achieving sustainable development by balancing domestic and foreign businesses.
In addition, during the development of CRRC, the enterprise highly emphasized the innovation system constructions and established a comprehensive technological innovation system that involves the organizational, resource, decision-making, and management rule systems, to support the developments of high-speed rail’s full technology chain, full product chain, and full innovation service chain. Figure 2 describes the technological innovation system of CRRC.
Conclusions
China’s high-speed rail industry has advanced and surpassed the global competition. After years of efforts upon indigenous R&D, introduction and absorption, and indigenous innovation, China has completed the construction of its high-speed rail industry system, which not only outputs its standard EMUs to domestic and global markets upon fully indigenous technologies, but also establishes the world’s most comprehensive high-speed railway network covering more than 80% of the country’s major cities. In addition, the key player of China’s high-speed rail industry, CRRC, has leveraged global competitiveness and outputted its products and manufacturing capabilities all over the world. High-speed rail has become the representative case sustaining the great power for the country.
The Author(s) 2018. Published by Higher Education Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)
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