In recent decades, a number of books and papers have been published on the history of the construction and operation of the Kiaotsi Railway (Jiaoji tielu 胶济铁路) and its impact on the economy and society of Shandong. A new monograph by Wang Bin, Modern Railway Technology Transfer to China: The Case of Kiaotsi Railway, 1898-1914, with its perspective on technology transfer and reference to German-language materials, is one of the latest examples of such fruitful research. The Kiaotsi Railway connects Qingdao (a harbor by Jiaozhou Bay) and Jinan (the capital of Shandong Province), traversing most of the province from east to west. The railway was built by the Germans from 1899 to 1904. The Shandong city of Gaomi, past which the Kiaotsi Railway runs, was the hometown of the Chinese novelist Mo Yan, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in October 2012. Mo's stories, said to merge folk tales, history, and the contemporary with magic realism, sometimes take place against the backdrop of the railway. Why did the Germans choose to build a branch line in Shandong rather than a main line in the hinterland when they came to China? From a macroscopic perspective, Germany was a relative latecomer to the imperialist scramble for colonies across the globe in general, and in China in particular, and could therefore only develop in territories not yet encroached upon by Britain, France, America, Russia, and the other great powers of the time. From a microscopic perspective, the German navy desired to compete with Britain's Royal Navy for supremacy and to seek a suitable foothold on the coast in North China, where Qingdao was the ideal choice.
