When my wife and I boarded the G76 in Kunming, the sleek white train gleamed like an arrow waiting to be released. In just ten hours, it would carry us nearly thirteen hundred miles north to Beijing—a journey that once took days, now compressed into the length of a workday.
As the train began to move, there was no lurch or jolt, only the quiet hum of acceleration, a sound more like wind than motion. I remembered the song my father used to sing when I was a boy—“Clickety-clack, go lunk,go lunk, the train is coming, a-chunk, a-chunk.” The rhythm of the old steam engine has vanished; the rails no longer sing that way. Yet something in me still listens for that steady pulse, the sound of continuity between generations.
Through the window, Yunnan’s hills unrolled in shades of green and brown, then gave way to tunnels and viaducts that seemed to defy gravity. We passed small villages tucked beside terraces, flashes of laundry, cattle, and cellphone towers—a rural world speeding by at two hundred miles an hour.
As we emerged from yet another tunnel, the mountains falling away behind us, I found myself wondering how all of this had become possible—how a nation that had no high-speed trains twenty years ago could now link its farthest provinces in a matter of hours.
In less than two decades, China built the world’s largest high-speed rail network—an achievement as much political as technological. The capital came from the state, poured into railways through low-interest loans from national banks and a post-2008 infrastructure surge that kept millions employed. The technology was first borrowed, then mastered: Japan’s Shinkansen, Germany’s ICE, and France’s TGV all left their genetic traces in China’s sleek new trains. Engineers learned fast, standardizing designs and scaling production until foreign patents gave way to domestic innovation. It was a triumph of will and coordination, but also of central control—an empire of motion built by decree, linking distant provinces in hours, yet reminding travelers how quickly power can shape both landscapes and lives.
As we sped north through the valleys, I kept thinking about that learning curve—how China had learned to build a fast train so fast. In the early years, it bought its technology from Japan, Germany, and France, inviting foreign engineers to build and teach on Chinese soil. But the lessons did not stop at imitation. Chinese designers adapted what they received, improved it, and soon began exporting their own. Even the tunnel-boring machines that carved these dark passages were first imported, then replicated and refined until they, too, bore Chinese names. It was an astonishing act of collective learning—part partnership, part appropriation—driven by the will of a nation determined never again to depend on others for its future.
Somewhere north of Wuhan, the land began to flatten. The fields widened, the villages thinned, and the afternoon sun poured through a haze of dust and light. My wife dozed beside me, and I thought of how her own family’s journey began—fleeing Nanjing in 1949 as the Nationalist government collapsed and the new People’s Republic rose. Her father had worked for that government; her mother carried the memories of flight and loss that would shape a lifetime. Seventy-five years later, here we were, gliding north across a unified land, tracing in ten hours what once marked generations of separation.
The hum of the rails grew steadier, almost meditative, like breath. Somewhere between Kunming and Beijing, between my father’s clickety-clack and this near-silent glide, I realized how much the world can change in a lifetime—and how faith, like memory, must find its voice again amid the noise and speed of progress.
The Chinese government wants to domesticate—or sinicize—all faiths, including the Christian faith, just as it has done with high-speed rail technology. Yet the Christian story has always been one of translation and transformation, as the Word—in Chinese, the Dao (道)—moves from one people and culture to another. And with each crossing, there is always a new song for the Way, as the Spirit brings life and joy to all peoples everywhere. The question is whether we can learn again the unforced rhythms of grace—both in China, in the West, and in the Global South—as we together wait for the fullness of the Kingdom to come.
