China opened its first dedicated high-speed line, Beijing to Tianjin, in 2008 and went on to build the world's largest such network, exceeding 40,000 kilometres by the early 2020s. Trains running at 300 kilometres per hour or more reorganised inter-city travel and spawned new station districts, often built on greenfield land at city edges. The network knitted clusters such as the Yangtze River Delta and Pearl River Delta into integrated mega-regions. It also became a flagship export of Chinese infrastructure under the Belt and Road.
It compressed the time-space of urban China, restructuring regional hierarchies and generating a new generation of station-anchored urban districts.
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