The high speed rail goes all the way inland to Chengdu at the moment, and all the way down the coast to Guangzhou
Further than that. Pretty much every city is connected unless by HSR you only mean the 300kph ones. You can take the 200kph to almost everywhere, Yunnan, Guizhou, Guangxi. Beyond that you can also take the old fashioned 绿皮 to every tiny city, it’s romantic but slow and often annoying (and hot in the summer).
travel across the country from Peking to Shanghai.
If you start in Beijing you can go to so many interesting places though. Go BJ-> Xi’an-> Chengdu -> Chongqing maybe. All of those are huge cities but much more interesting, cultural and lets you see some real china than going to Shanghai. Don’t go to Shanghai, it’s more like an international city, and anything you can see there you can also see in more interesting cities.
oh cool he wants a Culture Mind to organize human society. too bad our “ai” is just machine learning and no actual intelligence