High-speed rail keeps Guangxi growth on track

A new service is providing the first express link between Beijing and a badly disadvantaged area. The service, primarily designed to aid the development of the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, has been successful so far, and there are now plans to extend its coverage, as Huo Yan and Xin Dingding report from Nanning.

A high-speed rail network that stretches almost 2,500 kilometers across a single country is not a common phenomenon.

In Japan, such a network would be impossible - the train would simply have to pull up at the island nation's Pacific coast - and in Europe, pan-continental high-speed railways have yet to take shape, although many European countries have built their own networks.