China Railway Rolling Stock Corporation is a Chinese state-owned company controlled by the People’s Liberation Army. So why are American cities contracting with them
for their rail cars?
Several large American cities have contracted with a Chinese state-owned rail car manufacturer to design and manufacture subway cars for their subway systems, raising serious cybersecurity and human-rights concerns. Over the past eight years, China Railway Rolling Stock Corporation (CRRC) has secured more than $2.6 billion in federal transit contracts to provide passenger railcars in Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia.
Lawmakers from both parties have taken notice, and are now demanding that the Biden Administration take action to prevent a company that has links to the Chinese military from dominating the railcar market in the United States.
CRRC, the world’s largest rolling stock manufacturer, has a headquarters in Springfield, Massachusetts (CRRC MA), and a production facility in Chicago (CRRC Sifang America). The Chinese state-owned company is reportedly controlled by the communist People’s Liberation Army (PLA), and has been identified as a threat to U.S. economic and national security. CRRC also has been called out repeatedly for human rights and labor violations.
In April 2019, retired U.S. Army Brigadier General John Adams wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post advising the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority to reject CRRC’s bid for its next series of rail cars.
Adams and other national security experts were concerned that China could “plant listening devices or malicious software in rail cars as a way to conduct surveillance or allow sabotage of trains traveling beneath or near the Capitol, Pentagon and White House.”
The retired general argued that city governments that use the company are putting “short-term savings over long-term national and economic security.”