The network passed 50,000 km of route in late 2025, more than every other country's high-speed lines put together, China State Railway Group said in a statement reported by Newsweek.
That scale and cost advantage now positions Chinese manufacturers to dominate export markets as well as their own, British railway historian Christian Wolmar argues in "Fast Track", a global transport history book published July 23 by the Penguin imprint Michael Joseph.
Wolmar, who spent a week riding the network in May 2025 and toured two manufacturing plants for the book, puts the end-2025 total at 50,400 km, about 70% of the world's high-speed track.
The network carries an average of 9.36 million passengers a day across 9,346 services, rising above 16 million passengers and 10,000 services at peak, he wrote in a column for The Times drawn from the book.
It has grown by an average of about 8 km of route a day since the first line opened between Beijing and Tianjin during the 2008 Olympics. In under two decades that has produced a system more than three times the size of Britain's entire current railway network.
