China not so confident about Guizhou's Hyperloop project

State-run tech news site asks if it’s “a hyper dream”

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Concept photo of HyperloopTT’s project in Guizhou, which it says will be ‘China’s first Hyperloop system’. (Picture: Hyperloop Transportation Technologies)

Published: 7:30pm, 25 Jul 2018Updated: 8:33am, 20 Sep 2019

This article originally appeared on ABACUS

China is joining the race to build a hyperloop... but state media is questioning whether it's a race worth winning.

A week after California-based Hyperloop Transportation Technologies announced that it struck a deal with China’s local Tongren government to “build China’s first hyperloop system”, the state-run Science and Technology Daily published a piece titled “Hyperloop marches into Guizhou -- is it feasible or a hyper dream?”

Hyperloop -- a transport system that runs trains through a vacuum tube to make them go much faster than ordinary trains -- was first proposed by Elon Musk. There's a growing number of companies who say they're aiming to build hyperloop systems, but none have made it past the test phase.

The paper’s main concern with the hyperloop project is its practicality. It won’t be compatible with China’s existing high-speed rail network, which is already safe and mature. Huanqiu.com, owned by the state-run Global Times, said “we must remain calm”, warning that hyperloop is at a very early stage of development. Most people on Weibo and Zhihu, China’s Q&A site, expressed concerns about the cost to the local government, because it will bear half of the project’s financing.

So what do the two parties want out of this? The local government of Tongren, a fifth-tier city in the southwestern province of Guizhou, said that as a less developed city, it wants to raise its profile by attracting investments and to develop its tourism industry.