China's all-in embrace of high-speed rail transportation has put trains back in the global discourse, reshaping international and national imaginaries. Incorporating the Chinese case can substantially reshape our understanding of rail mobility can be and ought to be. The nationwide transformations wrought by Chinese rail offer mobility studies an opportunity to reengage with how mobility shapes community at the national scale, and the central role of the state highlights the peculiar connection between rail imaginaries and an interventionist state—paralleling a striking renaissance of rail imaginaries in Europe and the United States. As the “China Model” circulates across the globe and Chinese rail technologies proliferate, Chinese rail mobility will remain both theoretically and empirically significant.
Dylan Brady, an assistant professor in the NUS Department of Geography, is a human geographer employing infrastructure as a lens to examine how geopolitical abstractions like “nation” and “state” emerge through and manifest within the mundane things and banal practices of everyday life. Previous projects have examined rail infrastructure, health code apps, and airport interfaces in China, and his current project examines the digital infrastructure of cashless payment systems in Singapore and Southeast Asia. Email: d.brady@nus.edu.sg