China high speed rail wheels the real story of self reliance

China did not achieve wheel independence because Germany restricted exports or raised prices. The record shows no such curb. What happened is more interesting. Chinese firms learned the metallurgy, built the plants, won the certifications and became exporters.

For years China’s high speed trains ran on foreign wheels. The country built the world’s largest bullet train network but still depended on the precision steelwork of German and Japanese firms for the most critical moving part. Videos on TikTok and YouTube now claim that Germany restricted exports of high speed rail wheels to China, inflated prices and forced Beijing into self reliance. It is an appealing tale of adversity breeding innovation. It is also untrue. There is no record of any export ban, no government filing, no European directive limiting wheel sales to China.

In fact, the traffic has gone the other way. In 2016 a Chinese investor bought Bochumer Verein Verkehrstechnik, Germany’s leading maker of high speed wheels. Two years later Maanshan Iron and Steel, better known as Masteel or Magang Group, began shipping high speed rail wheels to Germany itself. That is hardly the hallmark of a blocked trade route.

The real story is industrial rather than conspiratorial. Faced with the vulnerability of foreign supply, China spent the past decade mastering the metallurgy, forging and testing of high speed rail wheels. The work was led by Masteel, the China Academy of Railway Sciences, and CRRC, the state rail conglomerate that operates China’s high speed network. Supporting plants such as Taiyuan Heavy Industry and Bohai Steel Group built complementary forging lines and machining capacity. Together they created a full domestic ecosystem from steel smelting and ultrasonic testing to fatigue and safety certification.

Masteel’s facilities in Anhui were certified to national CRCC standards, producing wheels capable of withstanding 380 kilometres per hour in climates from Siberian cold to Gobi heat. By the late 2010s China had become a net exporter, not a dependent buyer. The achievement was remarkable. In less than fifteen years Chinese steel plants learned to produce wheels with microscopic precision and extreme fatigue resistance, technologies once monopolised by German and Japanese forges. Engineers refined steel chemistry, reduced internal inclusions that cause microcracks and developed heat treatment processes ensuring stability across millions of rotations. From furnace design to ultrasonic inspection, each stage was reinvented domestically. The result was a wheel that met international standards and could be sold abroad under China’s own name. That, not any foreign embargo, is what makes the story extraordinary.

The Japanese dispute often mentioned in the same breath concerned train design, not wheels. In 2011 Kawasaki Heavy Industries accused China of patenting derivatives of its E2 series. No court ruled, and China pressed ahead with its own Fuxing trains. The episode hardened Beijing’s resolve to own every layer of the supply chain.

TikTok and YouTube continue to circulate a myth that German restrictions and price hikes forced China into self reliance on wheels. This is not true. There is no evidence of a German export ban. What is true is a story of methodical innovation. Chinese metallurgical firms and research institutes designed their own wheel, created their own high speed wheel technology and proved it at scale.

Today the steel rings that carry its bullet trains are entirely of its own making, forged by Masteel, integrated by CRRC and validated by the laboratories of the China Academy of Railway Sciences with capacity supported by Taiyuan Heavy Industry and Bohai Steel Group. The transformation was not born of denial or defiance but of design.