Liu Zhijun

This made Liu's plan the world's most well-funded public infrastructure project since the American president Ike Eisenhower constructed the American Interstate Highway System in the 1950s.

Liu Zhijun (born 29 January 1953) is a former Chinese politician who served as Minister of Railway.

Liu was a Peasant's son who left school in his teens to take a job as a low-level bureaucrat in the Railway Ministry.

When he was a teenager, in 1972, he left school and took a job as a low-level bureaucrat in the national ministry of railways.

He joined the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) the next year, in August 1973.

While working at the rail ministry he became a trusted letter-writer for some of his more poorly-educated superiors within the ministry, and in 1974, when he was twenty-one, he married into a politically well-connected family.

Liu graduated from the Party School of the CCP (a university established specifically to educate Party leaders) in July 1988, majoring in Marxist Philosophy.

Liu continued his education, later earning a master's degree in Engineering from the Party School.

Liu ascended through the ranks of the rail ministry swiftly, and before running the entire ministry served two separate, subsequent terms as the director of two regional railway bureaus, in Liaoning and in Henan.

He became a member of the CCP Central Committee during its sixteenth congress, in 2002.

He rose rapidly within the Ministry, eventually heading several regional railway departments and serving as vice-minister before being promoted to the head of the Railway Ministry in 2003.

As Railway Minister, Liu oversaw numerous expansions of China's railway system, most notably the rapid development of China's high-speed railway.

Liu was promoted to vice-minister, and later succeeded then-Minister Fu Zhihuan as Minister of Railways in March 2003 at the annual meeting of the National People's Congress.

At the time that Liu was made Minister of Railways, the Ministry of Railways was the second most powerful ministry in China (second to the military).

It had its own police, judges, and courts, and had a budget of billions of dollars.

After being named minister, Liu announced plans to dramatically expand China's then-underdeveloped railway system by building 7,500 miles of new high-speed railway tracks, more than could be found in the rest of the world combined.

The central government supported Liu's plans, and allocated Liu a budget of over two hundred and fifty billion dollars (over several years).

In order to complete China's first high-speed rail line before the end of 2008, Liu led the Railway Ministry's employees to work around the clock.

His habit of telling people that "To achieve a great leap, an entire generation must be sacrificed" earned him the nickname "Great Leap Liu".

(Some of his detractors also called him "Lunatic Liu" for the pace of his work).

While developing China's high-speed rail system, Liu also oversaw comprehensive upgrades of China's standard rail system, and he oversaw the opening of the Qinghai-Tibet Railway, the world's highest railway by elevation, but he regarded the development of China's high-speed rail system as his favourite project.

When China's first high-speed rail system completed its first test-run in June 2008 it was 75 per cent over budget, but was hailed in the Chinese media as an achievement worthy of national pride.

Liu described his achievement as having created a network with a comprehensive system involving indigenous Chinese intellectual property.

He stated that China had created a high-speed railway system that had the "greatest comprehensive technology, best integrative ability, highest operational distance, fastest operational speed, and largest scale of construction" in the world.

(In reality the rail system was largely based on German and Japanese designs).

Shortly after Liu's completion of China's first high-speed rail line, in the autumn of 2008, the Chinese government more than doubled Liu's ministry's budget (as part of an effort to combat global recession), and gave him the responsibility laying ten thousand miles of high-speed rail track by 2020: five times the size of America's first transcontinental route.

During his tenure, Liu's ministry was criticized for its illegitimate business interests and relationships with large companies, its inability to improve conditions for migrant workers during the Chinese New Year travel season, its slow response to widespread winter storms in 2008, and its failures to prevent the 2008 train collision in Shandong and a smaller collision in Hunan a year later.

In 2009 Liu gave a public lecture in which he voiced his opinion that, in order to avoid rising costs due to China's high rate of inflation, his ministry must "seize the opportunity, build more railways, and build them fast."

By 2010 Liu's budget was over one hundred billion dollars (US).

He was a figure of national praise until February 2011, when he was arrested and expelled from the Party over allegations of corruption.

After the Wenzhou train collision in July 2011, in which forty people died and one hundred and ninety-two people were injured, a government report singled out his leadership as one of the main contributors to the crash and he was publicly criticized.

In 2011, the American president, Barack Obama, cited Liu's high-speed rail system as evidence that American infrastructure was no longer the best in the world.

Before 2011 the Railway Ministry acted as its own regulator and was virtually unsupervised by the central government.

Liu personally attempted to intimidate academics critical of the pace of the high-speed railway's construction, and ignored Japanese warnings that his trains were being operated at speeds 25% greater than what was considered safe in Japan.

In April 2013, Liu was arrested on corruption charges for taking over 64 million yuan in bribes and abusing his power as Minister of Railways.

He was convicted and received a death sentence with reprieve in July 2013.

On 14 December 2015, Liu Zhijun's sentence was statutorily commuted to life imprisonment.

The prison authorities said that he was expressing repentance and had committed no intentional offences during the reprieve period.

Liu was born in Huarong, Hubei.

His father was a farmer, and he grew up in the villages around Hunan.