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| Shijiazhuang Railway Station at peak time as students start their summer vacations. (Zhu Xudong / Xinhua) |
Home from home
The railway still plays an important role in the lives of Shijiazhuang's residents. On Friday afternoon, Zhang Chao called his wife to tell her that he would be joining the family for dinner that evening. After taking the bullet train from Beijing, the 26-year-old arrived at the family home at around 7:30 pm, seeing his wife and parents for the first time in five days.
Zhang's routine hasn't changed for the past two years; he leaves Shijiazhuang every Monday morning to travel to his job in Beijing and returns every Friday.
"It once occurred to me to buy an apartment in Beijing to save time traveling back and forth," said Zhang, who works as a legal consultant for the Beijing Railway Bureau. "But I can't afford the high property prices in Beijing - the average price was more than 17,000 yuan ($2,800) per square meter in June."
Zhang began his nomadic lifestyle soon after he started his job. "The journey only takes 70 minutes on the high-speed train, and at most two hours for the entire one-way trip including the bus from the railway station to my residential community. But sometimes Beijing residents spend just as long trapped in their cars in traffic jams, so it's quite acceptable."
His case is by no means unique, as many young people choose to remain in their hometowns because of the lower property prices, but work in Beijing because the wages are higher and there is a greater number of opportunities.
Businesspeople also benefit. "It's a great time for local companies to do business in Beijing," said Li Kang a manager at Jingkang Co, a chemical company that sells commodities, mainly in Shijiazhuang and Xingtai city, where Li lives.
His company purchases bulk goods, such as soda ash, in the Inner Mongolia autonomous region and the northwestern province of Qinghai and transports them by rail via Beijing to clients in Hebei. When a high-speed rail link between the source areas and Beijing opened in 2012, the journey time for the raw materials was cut to seven days from 20, allowing Li to increase the frequency of his purchases of raw materials.
"We plan to explore the huge market in Beijing, because it's easy and convenient to transport the materials to customers there. Some potential clients have realized that and have approached us with orders," said the 28-year-old, whose company has an average annual trade volume of 20 million yuan per annum. "We plan to cooperate more fully with companies in Beijing," he added.
Like many decision-makers in local companies, Li regards Beijing as a gold mine and is making moves to tap the huge potential market. The speed of travel between the Chinese capital and Shijiazhuang is a boon for business cooperation, especially for Shijiazhuang, because of the obvious advantages enjoyed by the capital in terms of talent, financing and technology, among other factors.
In 2012, Beijing invested 219 billion yuan in Hebei, about 43 percent of the provincial total, according to government statistics. Meanwhile, on May 22, Beijing and Hebei signed a contract listing the main areas of cooperation in the next two years. They include the local economy, environmental protection, and the transfer of certain industries from the capital to the province - the growth of the high-speed rail network is a priority item on the agenda.
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