One of my major pastimes nowadays is watching videos on China's High Speed Rail. I've lost "track" of the number of videos I've watched. I find them hypnotically soothing. Call me a nerd, but infrastructure development is a topic that gives me enormous joy.
This one on the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed rail link is one of my favourites. It's from Russia Today, and unlike the mostly fault-finding slant of typical Western media reporting on China, the tone of this documentary is refreshingly positive.
This video on the building of the Nairobi-Mombasa rail link in Kenya is another great one. China is making a real difference to the developing world, notwithstanding the smear campaigns on "debt trap diplomacy" (which have been debunked, by the way.)
Another of the videos I watched recently showed how rail tracks are actually laid. Previously, the process was manual, and could only lay 500 m of track every day even with scores of workers. Nowadays, with the process semi-automated, 2 km of tracks can be laid a day with only 20 technicians.
As the camera panned over the scene, I saw some Chinese characters come into view on the screen and almost subconsciously read them aloud - 安全第一 ānquán dì yī ("Safety first").
Such a thrill! I wasn't expecting to be able to make sense of anything, since most of the text I had seen until that point had a large number of unfamiliar characters. This just crept up on me, and I was myself taken aback that I could make sense of it at once.
[You may recall from a previous post that the character 安 ān means "safe", and the ideograph has the glyph 女 nǚ ("woman") under a roof. "Woman under roof" means "safe" in Chinese. That's cute and sad at the same time. The character 一 yī is probably the simplest Chinese character to learn, and means "one". 第一 dì yī means "first".]
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