Railway construction in modern China has proceeded quite slowly compared to Japan and, of course, Western countries. There were two railway building booms following the Russo-Japanese War of 1905-1906 which brought the total length of track in China to 23000 kilometers. China's main line of today was mostly completed during this period.
This rapid development of railways promoted economic development in modern China. For example, the important east-west line (the Long Hai line) sent cotton and other agricultural products from the northwest territories to the industrial cities in coastal areas, and, conversely, brought large quantities of cotton products and other manufactured goods from the cities to the northwest territories. The opening of the Jing Han and Jin Pu lines running north and south stimulated the rapid development of commercial production, including agricultural goods and raw materials for manufacturing, in regions along the lines. The development of the railways also contributed to the steel and machine industries. For example, China's first steel plant (Han Yang Tie Chang), was established to provide rails for the train lines, while the Tang Shan and Chang Xin Dian railway repair plants trained numerous skilled workers, making a major contribution to the development of the country's machine industry. Grasping the conditions of railway construction is essential for the research and analysis of modern China's economic development.
Further, it is well-known that there is a close correlation between the length of track operated and numbers of passengers and amount of freight moved, on the one hand, with the growth rates of per capita national income and the national economy. Therefore, the compilation of railway-related statistics is important to fulfilling the goals of the Statistics Project and of the China Group.
In all honesty, before beginning the task, our outlook was extremely optimistic. We expected that since railroads are a modern industry and, further, that since most of the lines were state-owned, a large amount of materials would undoubtedly remain compared to other industries. Moreover, we thought we could use the statistics compiled by Prof. Ryoshin Minami on Japanese railways as a starting point to make the whole task quite simple. However, upon getting started, we ran into a number of problems. Missing materials and research lacunae were far more serious than we had expected.
The construction of the railways in China started in the 1880s, but development proceeded quite slowly for the next thirty years. Of course, a large volume of written materials on funding for construction, length of lines, and transport conditions still remains, but in all cases many of the public documents and publications are scattered around to the extent that it is not possible to comprehend the information in a systematic fashion.
The Central Government Communications Bureau, the agency with jurisdiction over the railways at that time, first published Communications Bureau Statistical Tables on Administration of Roads, a collection of railway statistics, in 1907. However, soon after the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty during the Republican Revolution, the publication of statistics ceased, after just three years. In addition, the materials do not record information from that era objectively, so they cannot be judged satisfactory.
At the beginning of the Republic, the central government's Transportation Bureau and Railway Bureau began to publish statistical materials on the railroads once a year (in the publication China National Railroad Accounts, but the title changed every year) Afterwards, one section of the National Railway Agency published at the rate of about once every year financial and other statistical reports (or tables) on railway lines under the agency's jurisdiction. However, the outbreak of the China-Japan war in 1937 brought publication of this type of statistical materials to an end. Thus 1936 was the last year in which the data was aggregated. From that time until 1949, railway data was in many years included among other information in yearly publications and statistical materials issued by the central government's Accounts Bureau, or sometimes the Finance Bureau or the Transportation Bureau. However, in terms of either continuity or quality, these later materials do not approach the statistical materials issued by specialists prior to 1937.
There are a number of problems and gaps in the statistical materials described above. In terms of time, for example, they only cover around 30 years from the beginning of the 20th century. Further, in terms of content, only the national railways are investigated, and the information on numbers of employees and wages is ambiguous. Despite these limitations, nonetheless, these are the most important materials for understanding the history of China's railway transport industry.
A number of other countries which established railway administrative bureaus in China also compiled their own statistical materials. For example, among the published materials complied by railway bureaus such as Zhong Dong, Jiao Ji, and Man Tie (the South Manchuria Railway Co.) was found not only data on operations of the lines they ran, but material on other lines as well. In particular, surveys of the Manchurian railways were not limited to the South Manchuria Co., but covered a wide range of matters. In addition, from the early 1930 until the mid-1940s, organizations established by Japan in military-occupied areas such as, for example, Hua Bei Transportation Joint Stock Co., put out publications including Statistical Yearbook and Bei Zhi Men Jiang Nian Jian in addition to a wide range of survey reports. These include a considerable amount of historical materials on Chinese railways.
This section has described historical materials on the Chinese railway transportation industry. They are incomplete, to be frank, but used with skill much valuable information can be gleaned from them.
In 1953, the Institute of Economic Research of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, under the leadership of Yan Zhongping, began to edit materials related to China's modern economic history. The product was China's Modern China's Historical Economic Materials Selection (in Chinese). The statistical materials on railways include some of the material described above in better processed form. However, the existence of most of those materials was not known to the editors. This means of course that little of the material in Selection, though edited, can be used. Certainly the information in Selection on not just the railways but modern Chinese economic history as well should be regarded as a unique research achievement, but it is regrettably incomplete due to the restraints imposed by objective conditions when it was compiled.
In the summer of 1997, those of use in charge of handling the railway section of Selection paid a visit to Mi Rucheng, professor at the Institute of Social Research of the China Academy of Sciences and the leading scholar on Chinese railways. Prof. Mi had noticed that the railway sections were incomplete and had tried to supplement and correct them, but was ultimately unable to do so as a result of changing financial and political conditions. Further, there are very few people studying prewar railroads at present, and not a single specialist on railroad statistics. Before us, the last person to investigate the railways at the library and borrow materials was Prof. Mi, and the dates at which he had done so were back in the 1950s (at the time of the editing of Selection). This point alone speaks volumes about the state of railway statistical research for China.
From the time of the publication of Selection to the present, many articles and books on China's railways have appeared in other countries (most importantly, Japan, the US, Britain, and the former Soviet Union). These works have presented some original perspectives, but they have not created complete or systematic statistical materials.
In the first stage of our work, we investigated the state of the existing materials. Not only were all variety of materials on prewar railways scattered to begin with but as a result of the war they became even more dispersed among different regions. For this reason, we traveled through Beijing, Xi'an, and many other regions of China searching for materials. Further, simply looking through libraries' card catalogs to find sources was hardly a productive exercise. Instead we concocted various "schemes" and crawled around in perpetually dark book depositories, flashlights in hand and covered in dust, to search for useful materials. At the end of these exertions we finally obtained a few dozen items.
Next is the statistical task, and we have started by compiling estimates on the number of railway kilometers operated in the prewar period. Kilometers operated are the most basic railway statistics, but they were not compiled in the prewar era. Among the primary materials are recorded figures for kilometers operated for particular years (replete with numerous discrepancies of varying degrees), but no time series data exists. Nor is one estimated in Selection. Therefore, we compiled these estimates for our starting point. This job was truly difficult and tedious. Next, for 1912 through 1936, a period for which data is relatively easy to obtain (and which stretches from the founding of the Republic of China through the start of the war with Japan), we attempted to compile statistics on the business development of the railways (for example, volumes of different categories of freight). We presented a report on our findings at the October 1997 meeting of the China Group. There is still some need for revision of the figures, but we feel confident that they are quite close to actual conditions of the period.
We want next to improve the results described above and to try to compile income data related to railway operations for the 1912-1936 period. The latter is important because income data is necessary for the compilation of GDP estimates. However, information needed for estimates of income cannot be obtained from the primary sources so we will have to search for the appropriate materials. The second task awaiting us, though the limitations of data may pose a formidable obstacle, is to extend our estimates to cover the 1936 through 1949 period.
Science University of Tokyo, Suwa College