China will build a 4,350-mile (7,000-kilometer) high-speed rail line from Beijing to Moscow, at a cost of 1.5 trillion yuan ($242 billion), Beijing’s city government said on the social networking site Weibo, China's equivalent of Twitter.
According to Beijing's municipal government, the rail seeks to facilitate travel across Europe and Asia. The way from Beijing to Moscow would take “two days” on a route passing through Kazakhstan.
The rail line project was discussed in November, after Russia and China last year agreed on the largest natural-gas supply deal in history. Alexander Misharin, a first vice-president at state-owned OAO Russian Railways, said in a Nov. 18 interview that the plan would cost $60 billion to reach Russia’s border, and would cut the Beijing-Moscow journey from five days to 30 hours. Overall, the link would take eight to ten years to build, Misharin said.
In May 2014, after more than a decade of talks, Russia's natural-gas exporter OAO Gazprom concluded a $400 billion agreement with China to build a pipeline and start supplies. Misharin, in the November comments, compared the new transport network to the Suez Canal “in terms of scale and significance.”
Those comments came a month after a delegation to Moscow led by Chinese Premier Li Keqiang signed accords that included high-speed rail cooperation, a three-year 150 billion yuan ($24 billion) local-currency swap deal and a double-taxation treaty.
The proposed rail line comes as Russia’s economy struggles to recover from the fall in the price of crude oil and as relations with the U.S. and Europe deteriorate over the Ukraine conflict, and as China pushes to market its high-speed rail technology internationally.
