Across China: China-Europe freight train jumpstarts economic engines

A cargo train linking Yiwu in Zhejiang Province and Madrid in Spain has helped transform the small commodity export city in east China into a logistics base for imported goods.

"The prices of imported goods, such as red wine and olive oil from Spain, have dropped by 15-20 percent one year after the operation of the inter-continental freight train service," said Zhou Xufeng, chair of the Zhejiang Mengde Trade Co. Ltd.

Dubbed Yixin'ou in Chinese (Yiwu-Xinjiang-Europe), the 13,052-kilometer line is the longest train route in the world. With travel time one-third of shipping via sea and cost one-fifth that of air freight, it has stimulated the local import and export business.

For the whole of 2015, China's total export and import values continued decreasing by 7 percent year on year, falling for the first time in six years. However, Yiwu's small commodity center witnessed a surge of 46.2 percent year on year in its foreign trade volume, hitting 25.66 billion U.S. dollars in the first three quarters of 2015.

Jiang Yufeng, inspection official with Yiwu Customs, attributed the growth to the Yixin'ou freight train service, which turned Yiwu into a local transport hub, attracting exporters from coastal economic heavy weight Shanghai, who can now ship goods like television components and computer motherboards using the train.

Over the past year, 17 trains carried 794 TEU containers to Europe. Three trains sent 146 TEU containers of imported goods back.

Besides Yiwu, other cities like Hefei and Suzhou in east China, Chongqing, Chengdu, Wuhan, Changsha in west and central China as well as Harbin in far northeast China have launched similar freight train services to Europe, which run non-periodically.

Cargo trains between Europe and Harbin, capital of northeast China's Heilongjiang Province, for example, transported 87 million U.S. dollars worth of goods in the second half of 2015 after the service was launched in June.

The trains have carried more than 1,300 containers from Harbin, reaching the German city of Hamburg via Russia and Poland.

"Beer from Germany, ham from Spain, pizza from Italy as well as industrial products and daily necessities have become more accessible to ordinary Chinese," said Cheng Yao, vice head of the economic research institute of the Heilongjiang provincial academy of social sciences.

Taking 15 days, the 9,820-km journey facilitates trade from China, the Republic of Korea and Japan to European countries including Germany, Poland, France, Spain and Italy.

The cargo is mostly electronic components and automobile parts, said Tu Xiaoyue, general manager of HAO Logistics, which runs the service.

The inter-continental train services have not only boosted trade but also assisted China's manufacturing firms in expanding overseas business along the rail line.

Zhejiang-based automaker Chery Auto has sought to set up a completely knocked down (CKD) auto plant in Belarus with an initial production capacity of 120,000 units. Endi