On Aug. 30, more than 50 journalists from some 20 countries and regions including the U.S., Germany and France were invited to the China Railway Dispatching Command Center to learn about China's high-speed rail construction and related technological achievements.

"In just a few years, the length of China's high-speed rail has exceeded half of the world’s total. Automatic driving will be realized soon on China's high-speed trains," said a reporter from Angola National TV, amazed at the construction speed and technological development of China's high-speed railways.

This media trip was part of the city interview tour organized by the media center of the 2018 Beijing Summit of the FOCAC and the Information Office of the Beijing Municipal People's Government.

"By the end of 2017, the total length of China's high-speed railway network had exceeded 25,000 kilometers, accounting for 66.3 percent of the world's total," said Zhang Caichun, deputy director of the dispatching department of the China Railway Corporation. "Now China has the longest high-speed railways in operation, the most diversified operating scenarios, the largest scale of railway construction, and the most complete system technologies."

From 2007 to 2017, China's bullet trains carried 7.54 billion passengers, and the percentage of these passengers against all railway passengers soared from 4.5 to 56.8 percent, Zhang added.

Listening to Zhang's introduction of the rapid development of China's high-speed railways and watching the display monitors of the running trains in real time, the Angolan reporter was stunned by the rapid technological development of Chinese railways. He said he hopes that China could have more high-speed trains in operation and Angola could have high-speed trains someday.

A reporter with Ghana's Business Finance Times, who once took a train from Xi'an to Wuhan in China, said the high-speed train was "fast, convenient and comfortable" and that high-speed trains shorten the time and space between cities.

By 2020, the total length of China's operating high-speed railways will reach more than 30,000 kilometers, and cover more than 80 percent of China's major cities; by 2025, the length will reach about 38,000 kilometers; by 2035, China will have constructed a well-developed modern railway network that is interconnected, linking all major cities and covering all county territories. By then, the high-speed railway network will form a one to four-hour traffic circle between large- and medium-sized cities and one half to two-hour traffic circle within city clusters.

China's high-speed rail has not only achieved rapid development, but is now heading into the era of smart technologies.

Qian Zhengyu, deputy director of the Science and Information Department of the China Railway Corporation, said China is adopting advanced technologies such as cloud computing, the "internet of things," big data, artificial intelligence, and the building informatization model to build intelligent high-speed rails with intelligent manufacturing, intelligent equipment and intelligent operations as the core, and improve the production, operation and passenger services.

"When will the next generation of high-tech high-speed railway be available?" asked a journalist with Pakistani Independent Press as he took photos of the real-time dynamic graphs of the high-speed railways.

In response, Qian said China is currently carrying out comprehensive tests on key technologies of high-speed railways such as automatic driving at 350 kilometers per hour. Intelligent high-speed railways are under construction from Beijing to Zhangjakou and from Beijing to Xiongan New Area at Beijing-Shenyang High-speed Railway, which are to be completed and put into operation in 2019 and 2020, respectively.

With the extensions of China's high-speed railway network, international railway cooperation became one of the topics of concern to Chinese and foreign journalists. According to Zhang, with a number of international railway cooperation projects well under construction, such as the Indonesia's Jakarta-Bandung Railway, the China-Laos Railway, the Hungarian-Serbian Railway and the Pakistan Lahore Orange Line, China will hopefully cooperate with Africa to share China's high-speed railway development experience and create a better tomorrow for the African people.

On the same day, the journalists also visited the high-speed railway section in southwestern Beijing. They went into the repair workshop and learned about the details of the repairing procedures and standardized construction.