Official figures show that China Development Bank has already issued more loans to Africa than the World Bank, the African Development Bank and the Asian Development Bank combined over the past six years.

Wei Ruihai, vice-president of the private construction company China Hyway Group, a manufacturer specializing in high- and low-voltage electrical systems for railway projects, says financing is limited in Africa, meaning many foreign rivals from Qatar, Slovakia, Spain and Canada are unable to bid for big-ticket projects in the way that Chinese companies can.

"The deposit rates charged by local banks are normally higher than 15 percent and loan interest even higher than that, so it is short-sighted to borrow large amounts from them," says Wei.

To renovate the 1,000-kilometer Mocamedes Railway in Angola－linking the coastal desert city of Namibe in the southwest of the country to Menongue, the capital of Cuando Cubango province to the east－Hyway was able to bid $1.3 million per kilometer in the second half of this year, a third of the price of a rival Portuguese bidder.

"China is the only nation in the world that has carried out large and complicated railway projects in various geographic and weather conditions over the past decade," says Dong Yan, a rail transportation researcher at the Institute of Comprehensive Transportation within the National Development and Reform Commission.

Dong says that successfully completed projects by Chinese railway construction companies will certainly put them in an excellent position to win high-speed railway projects now expected to be offered in the US, Turkey and Brazil.