page_title: Liu Zhijun
section_title: Minister of Railways
hierarchical_section_title: Liu Zhijun / Career / Minister of Railways
caption_attribution_description: English: Speaker Pelosi and Rep. Ed Markey, of the US House of Representatives, with a high speed train. The Beijing to Tianjin line opened in August of 2008 and can go more than 200 miles per hour (320&#160;km/h).
context_page_description: Liu Zhijun is a former Chinese politician who served as Minister of Railway. Liu was a peasant's son who left school in his teens to take a job as a low-level bureaucrat in the Railway Ministry. He rose rapidly within the Ministry, eventually heading several regional railway departments and serving as vice-minister before being promoted to the head of the Railway Ministry in 2003.
  As Railway Minister, Liu oversaw numerous expansions of China's railway system, most notably the rapid development of China's high-speed railway. He was a figure of national praise until February 2011, when he was arrested and expelled from the Party over allegations of corruption. After the Wenzhou train collision in July 2011, in which forty people died and one hundred and ninety-two people were injured, a government report singled out his leadership as one of the main contributors to the crash and he was publicly criticized.
  In April 2013, Liu was arrested on corruption charges for allegedly taking bribes and abusing his power as Minister of Railways. He was convicted and received a death sentence with reprieve in July 2013. On 14 December 2015, Liu Zhijun's sentence was softened to life imprisonment.
context_section_description: Liu was promoted to vice-minister, and later succeeded then-Minister Fu Zhihuan as Minister of Railways in March 2003 at the annual meeting of the National People's Congress. At the time that Liu was made Minister of Railways, the Ministry of Railways was the second most powerful ministry in China (second to the military). It had its own police, judges, and courts, and had a budget of billions of dollars. After being named minister, Liu announced plans to dramatically expand China's then-underdeveloped railway system by building 7,500 miles of new high-speed railway tracks, more than could be found in the rest of the world combined. The central government supported Liu's plans, and allocated Liu a budget of over two hundred and fifty billion dollars (over several years).  This made Liu's plan the world's most well-funded public infrastructure project since the American president Ike Eisenhower constructed the American Interstate Highway System in the 1950s. In order to complete China's first high-speed rail line before the end of 2008, Liu led the Railway Ministry's employees to work around the clock. His habit of telling people that "To achieve a great leap, an entire generation must be sacrificed" earned him the nickname "Great Leap Liu". (Some of his detractors also called him "Lunatic Liu" for the pace of his work). While developing China's high-speed rail system, Liu also oversaw comprehensive upgrades of China's standard rail system, and he oversaw the opening of the Qinghai-Tibet Railway, the world's highest railway by elevation, but he regarded the development of China's high-speed rail system as his favourite project.
  When China's first high-speed rail system completed its first test-run in June 2008 it was 75 per cent over budget, but was hailed in the Chinese media as an achievement worthy of national pride. Liu described his achievement as having created a network with a comprehensive system involving indigenous Chinese intellectual property. He stated that China had created a high-speed railway system that had the "greatest comprehensive technology, best integrative ability, highest operational distance, fastest operational speed, and largest scale of construction" in the world. (In reality the rail system was largely based on German and Japanese designs). Shortly after Liu's completion of China's first high-speed rail line, in the autumn of 2008, the Chinese government more than doubled Liu's ministry's budget (as part of an effort to combat global recession), and gave him the responsibility laying ten thousand miles of high-speed rail track by 2020: five times the size of America's first transcontinental route. By 2010 Liu's budget was over one hundred billion dollars (US). In 2011, the American president, Barack Obama, cited Liu's high-speed rail system as evidence that American infrastructure was no longer the best in the world.
  In 2009 Liu gave a public lecture in which he voiced his opinion that, in order to avoid rising costs due to China's high rate of inflation, his ministry must "seize the opportunity, build more railways, and build them fast." Before 2011 the Railway Ministry acted as its own regulator and was virtually unsupervised by the central government. Liu personally attempted to intimidate academics critical of the pace of the high-speed railway's construction, and ignored Japanese warnings that his trains were being operated at speeds 25% greater than what was considered safe in Japan.
caption: Liu with Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Ed Markey, of the US House of Representatives in May 2009. Behind them is a Hexie Hao train on the Beijing–Tianjin Intercity Railway.
exif: {"Image Make": "NIKON CORPORATION", "Image Model": "NIKON D3", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "300", "Image YResolution": "300", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Ver.1.00", "Image DateTime": "2009:05:28 15:03:22", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Co-sited", "Image ExifOffset": "228", "GPS GPSVersionID": "[2, 2, 0, 0]", "Image GPSInfo": "32764", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "300", "Thumbnail YResolution": "300", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "32892", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "9185", "Thumbnail YCbCrPositioning": "Co-sited", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/60", "EXIF FNumber": "8", "EXIF ExposureProgram": "Program Normal", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "1250", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0221", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2009:05:28 15:03:22", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2009:05:28 15:03:22", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF CompressedBitsPerPixel": "4", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "0", "EXIF MaxApertureValue": "4", "EXIF MeteringMode": "Pattern", "EXIF LightSource": "Unknown", "EXIF Flash": "Flash fired, compulsory flash mode, return light detected", "EXIF FocalLength": "24", "EXIF SubSecTime": "32", "EXIF SubSecTimeOriginal": "32", "EXIF SubSecTimeDigitized": "32", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "2784", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "1848", "Interoperability InteroperabilityIndex": "R98", "Interoperability InteroperabilityVersion": "[48, 49, 48, 48]", "EXIF InteroperabilityOffset": "32732", "EXIF SensingMethod": "One-chip color area", "EXIF FileSource": "Digital Camera", "EXIF SceneType": "Directly Photographed", "EXIF CVAPattern": "[0, 2, 0, 2, 0, 1, 1, 2]", "EXIF CustomRendered": "Normal", "EXIF ExposureMode": "Auto Exposure", "EXIF WhiteBalance": "Auto", "EXIF DigitalZoomRatio": "153/100", "EXIF FocalLengthIn35mmFilm": "36", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Standard", "EXIF GainControl": "High gain up", "EXIF Contrast": "Normal", "EXIF Saturation": "Normal", "EXIF Sharpness": "Normal", "EXIF SubjectDistanceRange": "0"}