Express railway between China and Poland improves trade

World Today

An ancient trade route used to bring Chinese silk and pottery and tea to Poland, and Polish amber to China. Now 2,000 years later, an express freight railway is connecting the two countries, bringing goods between the Polish city of Lodz, and the southwest Chinese city of Chengdu.

CCTV’s Tao Yuan reports from Sichuan Province.

Shipping containers in China will soon leave for Europe, covering a distance of 9,800 kilometers (6,089 miles) until they arrive in the Polish city of Ludz in under two weeks.

Dozens of shipping containers leave this Chengdu station every day, packed with electronics, heavy machinery, shoes, and clothes, and taking back mostly food and drinks.

Tomasz Grzelak’s company operated the very first train that ran from Lodz to Chengdu in 2013. Back then, the train would run empty from Poland to China. Grzelak soon saw a business opportunity.

“In 2015, we started to analyze the possibility to create the return train from Lodz to Chengdu, because the cost – in this way we can reduce the cost, because that shuttle train means that we can use not empty boxes in the return way, but we can sell the service on the market so we will have additional profit in the business,” Grzelak said.

Grzelak has also just started a Polish food and beverage business in Chengdu.

Leaders on both sides hope that growing trade relations will improve all ties.

“I’m also trying to set up some ties between local universities to make some exchanges, to send more students to Poland, to exchange professors,” Katarzyna Wilkowiecka of the Polish Counsul General in Chengdu said. “Polish presence in China is going to grow, and also Chinese presence in Poland is going to grow, so the market for Chinese people speaking Polish is growing.”


Justyna Szczudlik of Polish Inst. of Int’l Affairs on Chinese-Polish ties

CCTV America’s Susan Roberts interviewed Justyna Szczudlik a Chinese analyst at the Polish Institute of International Affairs about China-Poland ties.