The UP Asian Center will be holding the online lecture "China's High-Speed Rail: From Domestic Development to International Practice" on 12 May 2026, 2:00 PM, PST (GMT+8), online via Zoom. The event is free and open to the public, but signing in to a (free) Zoom account is required.
ABOUT THE LECTURE
This lecture provides a concise overview of China's high-speed rail (HSR) development and its overseas expansion efforts. The first part traces China's HSR journey from a latecomer to the world's largest network, which now accounts for 70 percent of global HSR mileage. It highlights the role of long-term national planning, the "stepwise progression" across seven five-year plans, and the transformative impacts on travel time, economic geography, and social life. The second part examines the opportunities and challenges of China's HSR going abroad. The third part turns to two case studies: the Jakarta-Bandung High-Speed Rail in Indonesia and the China-Laos Railway. The lecture concludes with a discussion of what can be replicated and what remains context-specific. The replicable elements include the concept of connectivity-first development and industrial synergy, while context-specific factors include geography, political trust, and strategic alignment.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Dr. TAOTAO DENG
Associate Professor, School of Public Administration and Policy
Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, China
Dr. Taotao Deng is a Professor and doctoral advisor in Regional Economics at the School of Urban and Regional Science, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics (SUFE). Following the completion of his PhD at the University of Aberdeen, his research has focused on the intersection of regional development, tourism economics, and transport infrastructure. Recently, he has expanded his work to examine digital-intelligence transformations, with 2024 and 2025 publications investigating how digital inclusive finance influences domestic tourism demand and urban economic resilience. A prolific contributor to high-impact journals, his latest research also explores tourist attraction appraisal and the synergy between digital economies and high-quality tourism development across Chinese prefecture-level cities.
ABOUT THE REACTORS
ALEXANDER MICHAEL G. PALMA, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Asian Center, UP Diliman
Dr. Alexander Michael Palma is an Assistant Professor at the UP Asian Center. His research interests revolve around the field of development studies across a diversity of sectors to include, health, and nutrition, local governance, trade, social entrepreneurship, environment, public finance, project evaluation and monitoring, institutional economics, energy, urban and regional development to name a few. Dr. Palma devoted more than twenty years in development work having been engaged in projects for the United Nations, the World Bank, Japan International Cooperation Agency, the European Union, and Japan Bank for International Cooperation He has also been actively promoting the cause of health and nutrition ofchildren, trade and investment, public finance management, housing, education, civil identity and rights, infrastructure development among others. Dr. Palma contributed works in Japan studies, and received citation for the researches in the fields of local government and decentralization policy. Dr. Palma authored public finance studies at the Philippine Institute of Development Studies or PIDS. He conducted a review of the President’s budget, which involved the analysis of the utilization of the health appropriation.
MARIE DANIELLE V. GUILLEN, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, UP Asian Institute of Tourism
Dr. Marie Danielle V. Guillen is an Associate Professor at the Asian Institute of Tourism and a Research and Extension Fellow, of the National Center for Transportation Studies-University of the Philippines (UP)- Diliman. She is also an Affiliate Faculty of the Department of Architecture, College
of Humanities and Social Sciences in UP Mindanao. She presently serves as one of the Board of Directors of the Transportation Science Society of the Philippines and one of the founding members of the Women in Transportation Leadership in the Australia-Asia region. An inclusive mobility advocate, her academic research focuses on public transport and climate change, sustainable mobility, active transport tourism and informal transport. She recently published a chapter about active transport and motorcycle taxis in the Philippines on Extended Mobility for the City as a Common book as well as articles in Research in Transportation Economics and Asian Transport Studies journals. She received her Ph.D. and M.S. in Policy and Planning Sciences both from the University of Tsukuba, Japan, and her M.A. in Urban and Regional Planning and B.A. in Sociology degrees from the University of the Philippines.