What’s new: China is currently running fewer than 3,000 passenger trains a day, which the national railway operator said is down more than 70% from “normal times,” without providing the period of comparison.
Authorities have suspended many passenger services running out of regions hit hard by the country’s latest Covid-19 outbreak, China State Railway Group Co. Ltd. said in a Tuesday statement (link in Chinese).
The railway operator did not release how many passenger trains normally run nationwide, but according to a Xinhua News Agency report from before the pandemic in October 2019, an average of 8,538 passenger trains were operating each day during the first nine months of that year.
China State Railway added that it is taking advantage of the spare railway capacity to increase the number of freight trains on the tracks.
The context: High-frequency data show that road, rail and airline traffic have all been disrupted over the last month as China battles its worst Covid-19 outbreak in two years, raising concerns about broader economic impacts.
According to G7, an IoT platform that tracks millions of trucks in China, road freight traffic nationwide fell 29% year-on-year for the week through Sunday, marking the fourth straight weekly drop.
“As China, the world’s second-largest economy and the largest manufacturer, has been facing a rising risk of recession since mid-March, global markets may still underestimate the impact because much attention remains focused on the Russian-Ukraine conflict and U.S. Fed rate hikes,” analysts at Nomura Holdings Ltd. wrote in a Monday note.
Related: Highway Traffic Curbs Raise Concerns About Supply Chain Disruptions
Contact reporter Guo Yingzhe (yingzheguo@caixin.com) and editor Michael Bellart (michaelbellart@caixin.com)
Get our weekly free Must-Read newsletter.
