The subway that erases provincial borders

0:00Discussion keeps the world turning. This is Round Table. You live in one city and you work in another, and the only thing standing between you and your desk is an hour long crawl through traffic… Until now, Beijing's newest subway line doesn't stop at the city line. It keeps rolling straight into Hubei, turning what used to be a commute into something that feels more like a local errand. And that changes everything, not just for the people riding it, but for the very idea of where a city ends and where a region begins. Live from our studios here in Beijing, this is Round Table. I'm Steve Hatharly. Thanks for joining us today, and for the show I'm with you, Shen and Yushan. First up… What if crossing a provincial border became as easy as taking the subway across town? This China, the boundaries between neighboring cities, are becoming increasingly blurred. As metropolitan areas expand, and more people live in one city while working in another,

1:04cities are looking for new ways to make regional travel faster, cheaper, and more convenient. And increasingly, the answer is the train. Beijing is now taking another step in that direction. Its new Line 22 will connect major areas of eastern Beijing with neighboring Hubei Province. The near 80 km line is expected to significantly shorten the daily commute for people traveling between the two areas and potentially reshape their relationship between where people live, where they work, and access public services. It's not just about commuting for work, though. There's a business aspect to this as well. We're going to get into all of it. But let's start, Yushan and Yushan, good afternoon to you, with the geography a little bit, just in case our listeners are unaware of what it looks like on a map. So you've got Beijing and Tianjin that are basically attached to each other, or at least that's the way it looks on a map. And then Hubei Province is around it, but not a complete circle around Tianjin and Beijing.

2:07It's a three-part circle, if you will, where the east side of that second ring, that second circle would be left empty. That's the best way I could kind of describe it. But Hubei Province is absolutely huge, and it's almost in Gaul's Tianjin and Beijing. The way I would describe it as like, as if Hubei is trying to eat Beijing and Tianjin together in one wrap. Oh my gosh, our brains are similar, because my original explanation was going to be, Hubei looks like a robot that's eating two cities, and it hasn't eaten its mouth. At least on the map, that's how it looks like. Now that we're talking about the newly being tested subway line 22 of Beijing, that's Beijing's first urban rail line connecting the city with neighboring Hubei Province. And in late August, just very recently, the new line began its empty load trial operation. So that means the train itself is going through an exactly as the trains would in normal service, but without any passengers on board.

3:09So the empty train just goes, shoo, try out what kind of obstacles it may encounter as planned. Yeah, it's like the final testing phases, I guess. Yeah, exactly. And since now, the majority of the stations are already ready for service. So what the line covers include, like you said, almost 80 kilometers, well, 79.1 in details of kilometers of line that stops at 20 station in terms of for this empty load trial operation at least, because according to, this is according to China Daily, but if you look at other news sources, including some Hubei local news sources, they'll say that in total, at least for planning, there are over 22 or 21 lines. It's just right now for testing. There are 20 that's already ready. And the rest is still like getting themselves ready. There might be, there might be an extra station or two when it becomes operational. Yeah. Well, this is a really long line, 79 kilometers.

4:11And if it is like driving on the same route or it's the same length, it's probably going to take you two or like one hour, depending on the traffic. But if you're on this kind of line, it would be shortened to, I think 45 minutes, or even less than, like, less than one hour. And it will connect Eastern Beijing's Chaoyang and Tongzhou and Pinggu districts with San Hubei's Leng Fang City, creating a faster link between Beijing's central business district, which is this Chaoyang district and residential communities across the provincial border. So as we said, it is not only about commuting, it's also about business because while the people from that area and even from Hubei can now travel to the central area of Beijing easily, easily. Yeah. There are factory implications as well, which we'll get to in a little, in a little while. But let's talk about the tech too, because this is not your grandma, grandma's subway line.

5:17So to speak. Grandma's subway line. Yeah. This is a lot more hip and cool in tech savvy. It's a smart, it's a smarter line than your average subway line. I think it's totally worth expecting for us to be there and really see how it works, because the rail operator noted that the new line features Beijing's first passenger-focused intelligent video analytics platforms. So the system can integrate to real-time ridership monitoring, safety alert functions, and passenger service support capabilities. So in practice, here are some existing examples that I can find not on this particular line, but on other existing lines here in Beijing. So for example, such a similar system can act like a sophisticated, crowd-flow monitor. What it means is that it calculates the density and movement speed of passengers in real-time. And if, for example, one specific spot becomes too congested, like for example, maybe somebody fell and other people circling around and that whole channel or the whole lane is crowded

6:22to a point that just a lot of people is congested, then the system will trigger a present warning and dispatch staff member to manage the flow, be there in person and sort things out for you. Yeah, so instead of, I guess, relying on the staff to guess at what might have caused the delay, the system will give them all the information they need at once. And this makes it kind of proactive instead of reactive for the staff on site. So it means that it's safer overall. And I think it means that the commutes would be a lot smoother as well. The system can also identify when a passenger and their luggage or personal item have been separated for more than a certain amount of time, like five minutes, for example. That's kind of a cool thing. Yeah. If you happen to lose your personal item, the staff gets alerted and then it helps them to locate the lost item and then they keep it safe for you until you go back and pick it up from them. This is, of course, we know that they do these through monitors, CCTVs, but the thing is that

7:27they need to identify these things. And the hard part is to identify your person and also your personal item. Exactly. And then they will alert you in time. I think that is, I think, most fascinating part. And the current trial period will proceed in two phases. The first one, million covers integrated testing of eight core systems, like rolling stock or signaling and communication equipment. And then the second phase will conduct full simulated operations, following official timetables with comprehensive valuations of keep like performance indicators such as train punctuality and schedule compliance. So, and we know that is on like the empty low trial operations. This is mostly the last phase of the testing of new like whole operational line. So I think we can expect it will open very, very soon. Yeah, estimation says if everything goes well so far, then yeah, by the end of this year.

8:30By the end of the year. So we are just a few months away. Beijing, yeah, we're talking about Beijing today, but they're not alone in this. Other major Chinese cities, they're also working on expanding the city outer limits. If you will to achieve further connectivity, they're doing this with subway lines too. Yeah, and I was impressed to find out that actually China's first cross province subway was constructed over 10 years ago. That's in 2013 and that's the Shanghai Mitchell Line number one. So that one kind of connects the north and extension of Shanghai Mitchell Line 11 from until station in Shanghai to Huatiao station in Kunshan East China, Steng Su Province. So that was such a milestone for us to remember on how Mitchell is connecting like different cities, if not regional back, even back then. That was the country's first subway line to cross from one province into another province.

9:33From one metropolitan to a different province. Right, right, right. From Shanghai into a different province. This geographically, these two cities, first of all Shanghai and also Kunshan Kunshan is also part of Suzhou. So these two parts are really, really like close to each other and that's I think how this whole line can complete this first in China kind of mission. And also what I was seeing is that because I was there in Usi and that was actually my, I think two years ago, that was my happy place because oh, oh, oh, oh, round table's previous segment, happy place. Yes. I named it as my happy place because my hometown, Usi, was going to connect with another city, Suzhou, which means that in the future, I will be traveled to from Usi to Shanghai by Metro lines.

10:33And previously in your life, that was never possible before. No, but don't take it very, very seriously or like it is a very serious thing because travel to Shanghai by train will cost only like 50 minutes or 30 minutes. Oh, that's really fast. But still though, I mean, that still, yeah, sure, 15 or 30 minutes, but I'm sure that that made a huge difference for people and where they are willing to live because if that didn't exist before, getting from Usi all the way to Shanghai and in yes, a short amount of time. But if that wasn't an option and your only other options were taking the bus where you might have to deal with traffic and schedules or driving yourself, which involves buying a car and then dealing with traffic and schedule. So yeah, these types of projects make a big, big difference. So Shanghai is another example and then there's another one in Guangdong, yeah? Yeah. In southern China's Guangdong province, they have also been at the forefront of developing

11:35not only cross regional or metros, but also intercity railways too. But as early as November 2010, the first section of the Guangzhou Fou Chen Metro already began operation, making it the first metro line in Chinese mainland to cross a perfecture level administrative boundary. So that one connects, it seems like it connects two cities, but actually it's bringing a lot of convenience to people from the individual cities. Because within Guangdong, the intercity railway linking Guangzhou and the Xinjiang has already gradually adapted the more metro-like operating model, indicating that in the following years, even for their local railway building, they're also following the example given by the Guangzhou Fou Chen Metro line. So we can pretty much say that their provincial intercity railways are becoming more subway style. Yeah, and they were allowed to use the tap for the ticketing.

12:38They were, yeah, so you didn't have to go through this like typical high-speed ticket obtaining fashion where you could... Because now if you want to buy a train ticket, you have to go to either the traveling apps or a designated app in order to just get train tickets. But for people down there, they just had to use their phone to beep, just like you would on the normal subway. All right, so this is obviously a national trender. And by the way, there is another example or maybe a couple of other examples that we can talk about, but I think we've got the idea. So now let's come back to Beijing. And my question is, why now? Why is this being done now, Beijing with an arm, if you will, extending out into Hubei? What does this mean for the city, Beijing, and then the neighboring province? First of all, from the economic perspective, it amplified the economic influence of Beijing's sub-center, which is the Tungzhou area, quite a new area that you can visit.

13:44For three major counties in Lengfang, Hubei, Sanhe, Da Chang, and Xianghe, together nicknamed as the northern three counties, Beixianxian. So geographically and strategically, the northern three counties are surrounded by Beijing and Tianjin, making them a key area for Beijing's East Award expansion. And their integrated high quality development with East Beijing's district is a national strategy aimed at creating a model zone for coordinated development in the Beijing Tianjin Hubei region. And line 22 is a major step in putting that regional integration into action. And this is the factory, the business slash factory example that I was talking about before. Yeah, because economically speaking, we've been talking about in recent years that it's been a development trend here in Beijing to closely connect our development here with the neighboring Hubei and Tianjin municipality.

14:45Because we call it the sub-center on the eastern side of Beijing. So this is where the priority has been put into. And also economically, like you said, it allows Beijing's technological and also knowledge-wise of a brain and the northern three counties body to work together like simultaneously. Because Beijing has a concentration of research institutions, like we discussed before, like a lot of humanoid robot labs and research centers are located here. While the northern three counties, they have plenty of factory space and labor. So, okay, the body. So if we can align all of those spaces and low-costing spaces and resource with the already existing concentrated sources of technology and research skills, then this can be a very organic collaboration between regions. Sure. And what that means is you could have a company with their headquarters in Beijing and the

15:45production could be out in Hubei. And normally, a company would struggle perhaps to split itself into pieces like that. But if your workers at the factory and your researchers at the labs are on, you know, or are able to take a train that's maybe an hour trip back and forth between the two, well, then collaborating or coordinating is probably the better word between the two locations isn't really a pain anymore because then you could have your engineers or whatever, easily go out and visit the factory floor. So, yeah, brain and body easily connected when you have this type of train network. So I think that's partially answering why now. Because over the years, Hubei and Tianjin as well, they've been actively preparing themselves to get ready to receive this new flow of workload and workforces and how to elevate it on environmental surroundings locally.

16:48So now that they've, they are more or less ready, it's time we make things easier for people to commute, such as being connected by such a railway or a metro. Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, I was thinking the question why now or is it just because we are talking about this now. That's why we're like analyzing and trying to explain why we're having these kind of plan. But actually, this is probably a whole big project of connecting these area of this region because I can feel that it is a whole big plan that China is doing step by step. I visited this tone jaw area actually this year and last year there is a really, really big difference already. A last year, because I do subboarding in that big canal in this, in that district. And last year it was just a canal and alongside the river is just streets and sidewalks. Nothing really developed. No, but this year when I was floating on the canal, wow, I think they want to create a feeling

17:54of the Shanghai bun feeling, that whole skyline thing. And you can see a lot of big buildings, headquarters style buildings alongside the river. So this is, I think when you're thinking about that, okay, now headquarters are in that area and then there's going to be a lot of population in that area and we're, are they going to live probably in some counties in Rebe and they can take that subway probably for 30 minutes of commute. And I am quite sure that the housing price in Hebe is so much cheaper than in tone jaw or even in central district. Well, this is the other side of the coin. We talked about the business side, the brain and the body, but yes, this allows people to live in Hebe and comfortably get to work at least to the eastern or no, not just eastern to the central part of Beijing. Maybe the western side would be a little bit of a commute, a little bit too much of a

18:58commute, but at least to the eastern to the central parts. And yeah, this is going to make a big difference for commuters too. Yeah, because if we look at the new lines, the whole design of its stations, there are multiple transfer hubs that are available along the line connecting the new line with existing Beijing subway lines such as the line 14, line one or bottom line and also line six, also on the horizontal connecting the east with the western part of the city, as well as the Beijing Tangshan intercity railway on the other side of the city too. So the fast speed is bringing a maximum speed of 160 kilometers per hour, which can greatly save time from traveling between Beijing and Hebe. So the official data shows that the trip from Yenzhou to Beijing's Tongzhou district on the eastern side takes nine minutes. While rise to Hongmiao in the CBD core that's in Chaoyang district, into basically the core

19:58area of the Chaoyang district here in Beijing, only take roughly 28 minutes as far as I can found in the latest reports. Some said a little bit over 30 minutes, but still, nine minutes, 30 minutes, that's a lot better than how people used to travel between Hebe province and Beijing. I mean, that's faster than going from the western side to the eastern side of Beijing. Yeah, for listeners, if you're wondering why we're talking about Tongzhou district, which is part of Beijing, as somewhere so far away, you gotta understand that we're working right now on the western side of Beijing can take about two hours to travel to Tongzhou to the eastern side. We drove, but why would you drive? Particularly during rush hours, but people do it because people have to do it. That's why having something like this is such an important thing for people who want that option. This can bring a lot of big benefits to the commuters because if you have people going

20:58back and forth, and there are a lot of people going back and forth between the Beijing metropolitan area and outside of Beijing, it's almost, I mean, it's approaching a million people, right? Yeah, across the Beijing metropolitan area, around 700,000 to 750,000 people commute across provincial borders every day and longfang in Hebe alone accounts for nearly half of them. So there is a need, and more than 200,000 of these commuters live in the northern three counties. Yeah. You see it's about a million people. Like a couple of other people in the south side of Beijing, it's about 1000 people heading into Beijing every day. It's about a million people. You see these people, they are traveling mainly for now via buses to go to Beijing, and that's astonishing. That's one single bus route can take over an hour sometimes. But I heard that there are, it's not like they have to take two hours every day for morning

21:59in commute. They have really fast bust routes that they can, they don't, I think they don't even need to wait for lights or something. It's a whole system for commuters. Yeah. In recent years, I think because of such a large scale of people traveling between regions these days, there are like a layered step by step kind of development over their transportation system too. Like you said, there has been customized express buses to nowadays to address commuters paying points. So that was launched. And by early this year, seven main routes and 35 branch routes had already been introduced covering key areas such as Guamau in Wang Zing in Eastern Beijing and Yi Dwang in Southern Beijing too. Where's the other big hub of centralized kind of like a workflow tech hub. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's a good point to bring up now because we don't want to paint a picture that people who were living in Hubei and working in Beijing were walking to Beijing every day. There was a really reliable

23:02transportation system. It was pretty quick. I mean, an hour on the bus is not bad at all, as a matter of fact. Like we said, it's faster than getting from where we are on the western side all the way to the eastern side. But still though, I think we have to ask if this is going to really help compared to the other transportation methods because, you know, if you were to travel by subway from Central Shanghai, for example, to get to Central Sujo, that's in Jiangsu Province, then you'd have to pass through more than 50 stations. And that's going to take you more than two and a half hours. But if you go by high speed rail between the two cities, it's only 30 minutes. But that means that you're going to have different ticket prices. So if you want to take advantage of those higher speeds, then you're going to have to pay more. And the question is, will people be willing to pay more? Will the convenience, the increase in convenience be enough for them? And also the number that we're listing right now is the time that you get on the train

24:06and then reach the destination. That's the time that we're listing 30 minutes. But think about you need to get to the railway station. Wait for the train to arrive and then get off the train. And if you don't live right near the railway station, but you do live near the bus station. Exactly. And, you know, I have, I think I am, I have a lot of, like, living examples of experiencing these things. I've actually taken the route from Foshan to Guangzhou that you just listed your shine. And I found it incredibly convenient because you don't need to wait for that timetable that you need to book for the train. You don't, you don't have to worry about the timing or timing your trip to get to the, you know, railway station, first of all, and then get you get to the train. The metro is just convenient in the sense that with the line like this, it almost feels like you haven't even left one city for another. Right. And this can be really beneficial for, I think, the smaller

25:08city in this sense, because for from the economic perspective, it makes it much easier for people to commute between cities and also spend money and also move around the region on the daily basis. And so it's not only for commuting, it's also for people can spend time, spend money, spend everything there. And that goes in two directions too. Yeah. For people who live in Beijing who are looking for weekend stuff, weekend things to do, you know, if the option is, oh, well, we have to take a bus to get there. Here in 2026, the bus never sounds like an attractive option, even if it is only an hour. But if you say, oh, we can take the train, we can take the subway there in 28 minutes. That's going to encourage a lot of people to travel in that direction too. And I don't know about you guys, but I feel like every time when I'm assigned to like you need to go somewhere by train, then that feels like a heavy task. That feels like hours of preparation, getting a luggage done and buying tickets days before and securing a seat to prefer. But if you

26:11go by metro, like people do it every day, it's just daily commute. So the level of difficulty is more or less east. And the pressure for traveling is more or less east along that route too. It's more metro like then train like. Yeah. I think at its core, this whole approach is to provide metro style frequent and convenient service across intercity or like regional or urban rail network. So it's not really there to replace networks, but just so that people have one more option that they can decide in terms of traveling across regions. So yeah, I think essentially we can maybe even say that we're making railways more metro like because yeah, like these routes, they used to be the job, the main tasks of trains. But now subway cards are kind of sharing that workload a little bit. I don't know if you guys agree. There's a quote from the deputy director of the Institute of transportation at Qinghua University. He said intercity railways and metros are forms,

27:16both forms of urban rail transit, but they're signaling, they're ticketing, they're fair systems, and they're rolling stock are all different. Bringing these systems together would be a huge and complex undertaking. He also pointed out that operators need to consider whether fair revenue can cover, I mean, we didn't even, we didn't even talk about this aspect today. We could be here for two hours talking about this. Yeah, who's covering this cost? And also the revenue, because this is cross, this is cross border, right? So where does the revenue go when people pay their fares? Yeah, so there's, there's that angle as well. You've got a higher cost of running trains at a lot greater frequencies to, and you've got to consider all of these things before you convert these intercity railways into metro style operations according to the deputy director. Yeah, and also there are cases. It's not like every single of such railway were a metro built is like receiving

28:16a lot of revenue, because there are cases such as the Zhengzhou and Kaifeng intercity railway located in central China's Hunan province that proves to be actually a kind of an awkward planning in the first place, because in 2025, the local media in central in Hunan province, they've been sparking up heated debates over whether that line should adopt a metro style operations, because it's over nearly actually 50 kilometers long, and it connects the two major cities, Zhengzhou and Kaifeng along with a series of other important stations between the two points. And it was already open for operation in December 2014, but data shows that in 2019, it carried just 10% of the total passenger traffic between the two cities. So meaning that the planning and also the designing of the route, like you said, if both cities are constructing the who is to share which part of the load and should they work together and design together or should it be designed by one whole plan

29:19in general, that's all like very, that should be carefully taken into consideration before such a planned rose out. They're often like discussed together when it comes to like planning, construction and operations of intercity transportation. And think of them like highways and urban express ways, they may have different speed limits and numbers of lanes and areas they connect, but they are all part of the same road network and working together to get people where they need to go. Maybe they have different like populations and demands for different cities, but the thing is that I think this is a whole idea of making intercity transportation easier and offering a more option. And then I think for the purpose of spicing up the two areas like economy or the life, just just make it more convenient. Yeah, I forgot to ask you mentioned it before, you shouldn't about housing prices and rental

30:25costs outside of Beijing, Beijing can be quite expensive when it comes to buying a house or renting a house. Is there that much of a difference? Because obviously that's going to be a major motivator for people. If they're working in the eastern side or central part of Beijing and they're renting there and they have an option, oh, I can actually get to work within 30, 45 minutes or an hour, but I can pay a lot less in rent. Or is that not true? Is the rent prices comparable or are they not? Yes, there is such a big difference. Is there? Because rent is the most striking gap in living costs between the Beijing side of the new line and also the hubby side of the new line with differences reaching up to almost eight times or more. Eight times. Eight times. If you look at Chow Yang district in Beijing, Chow Yang is the commercial and employment hub. So it has the highest rents in the city according to multiple property data platforms. And between July and August this year, the average residential rents can, for example, if we're looking at a typical two bedroom

31:26apartment, it can cost at least 7,000 yuan in Chow Yang. That's a monthly rental payment. The same two bedroom apartment, if put in Yanzhou and Hobie province, rents for 1,800 to 2,500 yuan per month. Even in Tungzhou, which is still in Beijing and closer to Chow Yang, that rate is about 4,000 yuan. So you see how much people can save if they just decide to fully embrace the new subway line and live in one place and work in the other. Our next story we do might be Beijing government trying to get people to move back to Chow Yang because everyone has moved out to neighboring bay province. End of the year, I think is what you said. All right, so we'll keep our eyes and ears open and once it gets going, we might revisit this topic here on the show.