China Railway, meanwhile, said that China loaded 171,000 railway cars per day on average last month, a daily increase of 4,945 from a year earlier. Container freight on railways surged 39.5 per cent to 26.61 million tonnes, it added, in an surprisingly stable account of China’s rail freight network.

In the January-February period, China’s freight cargo rose by 0.6 per cent to 670 million tonnes, an all-time high, according to China Railway.

Rail freight is an important indicator used by economists to gauge the health of the economy. According to WikiLeaks, China’s Premier Li Keqiang said in 2007, when he was the Liaoning party secretary, that China’s economic growth figures were unreliable and said that he looked three indicators instead, namely railway cargo volume, electricity consumption and bank lending.

Zhao Jun, the freight division chief at China Railway, said the rise was because the network focused on transporting “key materials” such as coal, medical equipment and production inputs.

This is despite the fact that coal consumption at power plants in China was much lower than usual, dipping well below previous years’ levels.

“China Railway has reached out to various levels of local governments and enterprises to respond to their logistics needs in terms of production resumption, raw material supply and shipments of finished products,” Zhao said in a statement.

“Pick up from the eastern regions, Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces are still limited and at a premium cost due to the reduced capacity,” the note read, adding that in some cities of China, including Zhengzhou and Xiamen, cargo pick-up at railway stations was suspended for most of February.