The Orient Express

Anyone who saw the front page of the Taipei Times last Friday could be forgiven for believing it was Taiwan's answer to The Onion. Right out in front it declared "China Planning Rail Link to Taiwan." For those of you with a quick head for how geography and/or gravity work and are therefore skeptical you can check the article here.

The Taiwan Straight is approximately 180 km (>110 miles) long. That's one hell of a long bridge/tunnel. That is the distance between Los Angeles and San Diego, except that instead of simply driving through seismically unstable SoCal the Taiwan Straight also forces you to contend with typhoons, undersea volcanoes, and in-transit Chinese and American nuclear submarines (click on my rendition below!)

For comparison's sake the Chunnel between England and France is about 50 km and took six years to complete. The Seikan Tunnel in Japan is about as long and took 17 years to build. The Gotthard Base Tunnel in Switzerland, opening in 2015 will be 57 km long, is taking at least 22 year to build, and has cost $6.4 billion US dollars. The costs involved in building the China-Taipei-Neverland tunnel are hard to imagine and difficult to justify for a nation that still has hundreds of millions of people living like 19th century peasants.

Ignoring the physical problems there are still the massive political considerations. Not even China-friendly Taiwanese President Ma Ying-Jiu thinks it's a good idea at this point. In the event of a military showdown on the island the Taiwanese military is preparing for a protracted ground war and giving the Chinese a pre-existing railway into northern Taiwan would be giving them a suicidally ludicrous advantage. Of course the Chinese are planning this in anticipation of Taiwan peacefully coming back into the Mainland Fold. I'm reminded of South Korea's "Unification Road" that was built in anticipation of eventual Korean Unification.

But hey, they probably said the Great Wall was crazy too...