Trains that look like rockets will, perhaps, take China to the moon or the future or something, even as concerns about corruption and safety linger. In “How Fast Can China Go?” in the new Vanity Fair, Simon Winchester writes about riding the recent inaugural CRH380A bullet between Shanghai and Beijing. An excerpt:

“Shanghai’s Rainbow Bridge Station is sited next to the city’s old (but newly rebuilt) domestic airport and in a fast-growing nexus of skyscrapers, restaurants, and subway lines (the city had no subway lines until 1995 and now has 11, each one built deeper than the last). The station is run by a woman, Bao Zhenghong. She is a little under 40, pretty, brisk, friendly, with a blue diamond-shaped badge of authority (over dozens of men, at least) on the sleeve of her no-nonsense uniform blouse. As she paced down the concourse marble she remarked, between shy grins and blushes, that she had started work as a menial at a suburban station 20 years ago, on graduation from technical school. She could not in her wildest dreams, she said, have imagined being so swiftly promoted to take total control of this $2.3 billion glass monument (built in only two years) to China’s newness. Hers is the largest station in Asia, with 60 platforms: it sees 250,000 passengers a day, is made of 80,000 tons of steel, is home to countless stores and restaurants and viewing galleries, and is powered by the biggest solar-panel array in creation.

Miss Bao earns only $900 a month, hardly within a whisper of her country’s growing battalions of millionaires, but she’s proud nonetheless: A young woman like me, she gestured at the echoing immensity, standing under a football-field-size electronic display flickering with train information. Who could have believed it?

But behind her was a red silk banner, which was half the station’s width, and which probably granted her all the credibility she needed. It was a banner displaying a 100-yard-long sentence in large Chinese characters, a reminder of the underpinning ethos of a country that to many seems merely—but probably wrongly—a capitalist juggernaut, spinning wildly toward an improbable future. The sign was old-school politburo propaganda, the kind of rhetoric that once blared interminably down from loudspeakers in every factory and village commune in the country. It displayed for the ideological benefit of everyone in her station a sober exhortation, one that most station workers know by heart: LET US ALL WORK HARD TO HARNESS THE GOOD OF TECHNOLOGICAL ACHIEVEMENT TO CREATE THE FINEST RAILWAY IN THE WORLD FOR THE ULTIMATE BETTERMENT OF THE CHINESE PEOPLE. Miss Bao grinned. Perhaps that is why an achievement like hers is more believable.”

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Zooooom…