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Mark O'Neill

China has not made a final decision on whether to extend the  maglev train link from Shanghai to Hangzhou - nor on whether it will use Chinese or German technology.

This clarification by President Hu Jintao to visiting German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier in Beijing ended a dramatic week in which ThyssenKrupp and Siemens thought they had won their second major contact and then learnt that a Chinese firm had developed a rival product  that it  might export.

The only  maglev line in commercial use opened in 2003, built at a cost of US$1.2 billion, and runs 30 kilometres from Pudong international airport to  the suburbs of Shanghai. It reaches 430km/h and has carried nearly six million passengers.

On Wednesday last week, German Transport Minister Wolfgang Tiefensee said in Berlin that China had decided to extend the  maglev line  a further 180km to Hangzhou, using a consortium of the two German  firms.

'We are pleased that such a great step has been taken,'  said a Siemens spokesman. 'The extension will be made with us.'

But the next day,  a National Development and Reform Commission official said  that approval for the link to Hangzhou was still pending and that the government planned a second high-speed rail link between it and Shanghai.

Enter the Dolphin,  the  so-called project of Chengdu Aircraft Industrial Group (CAIG), a subsidiary of China Aviation Industry Corp that has over the last five years invested five billion yuan in a high-speed  maglev train.

A CAIG official said  they started construction of the train in Chengdu in  September, are due to complete it in April and plan to put it into trial operation this July at Tongji University in Shanghai with speeds of up to 500km/h.

The production cost  would be about 10 per cent cheaper than comparable  trains from Germany or France. 'If the trials go well, we do not rule out exporting it.'

If the trials are successful, Beijing could choose the Dolphin over the German maglev for the Shanghai-Hangzhou route.

This is  bad news for ThyssenKrupp and Siemens who developed the world's fastest and most hi-tech train but have failed to convince anyone outside Shanghai to build it.  The high costs and fears of environmental impact have deterred possible buyers.

'The maglev must be built in Germany now, not in 2010 or 2012,' Edmund Stoiber, state premier of Bavaria, said  last week. 'Our technological lead over China is only a matter of a few years. If we do not act now, this technology will no longer be exported by Germany but by the Chinese. It would be a joke if a high-tech country like Germany came up with all the inventions but the Far East made all the money out of them.'



Homegrown maglev emerges as dark horse