Media reports suggest Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will try to promote Shinkansen bullet train technology during his visit to the United States (which started on April 26) to cash in on the US' plans to prop up its economy with high-speed railway.

Obviously, Japan is competing with China to get a share of the high-speed train market in US and some other countries. So which country has the upper hand?

China may be a latecomer in high-speed train construction, but some of its technologies are better than other countries'. For example, one exquisite technological requirement is that the surface of the rails that touches the wheels must be delicately clean while the track geometry should be smooth, because even the minutest flaw could shake a train considering its high speed. This is just one of the areas in which China excels - the rails on the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed train line are so smooth that the test train reached speeds of 380 kilometers an hour without any evident shaking.