Yinchuan

don't know about that, but I'll tell you, when I went to, I was invited to go to Ningxia in 2018 to talk at a summit up there by the Chinese coal king, actually, in the big lignite fields of Ningxia.

Flew into Yinchuan, which is about two hours, like, northwest from Beijing by plane.

And When I got there, they gave us a tour.

There's about maybe 10 or 20 of us on our American group.

Okay, let's get into today's stories.

One afternoon in June of 1993, a movie director named Xie Jin sat on a couch in a production studio in the city of Yinchuan, China.

He was with a few members of his production team, and they were in the middle of auditioning what felt like the 100th terrible actor for the lead role in the film that he was directing.

However, this was not an ordinary lead role.

And just as one example, one of my best friends in China, she lives in Beijing, the capital, which is right on the coast.

But she's actually from a city called Yinchuan, which is the capital city of Ningxia, which is a region in northwest China.

It used to take her... about a day, 19 hours over a series of slow trains to get home to see her family.

And because of high speed rail, the last line of which just opened at the end of last year, she can get home in six and a half hours.

They are building almost all of the world's ultra high voltage transmission lines.

They're also a leader on wind as well.

And so what China is able to do is to bring these solar and wind resources, which are mostly in the less populated West, places like Yinchuan, where Celia, your friend, grew up.

and sort of basically pipe them through transmission lines into the big cities.