All jokes aside, things like this are why China is beating us. I am absolutely not a fan of the Chinese government, but the simple fact is they get shit done.
Much of the growth in China is entirely artificial and is basically a glorified jobs program. China builds tons of cities throughout the country to generate construction contracts and keep people employed. This trend has sort of recently reached a head, and China is now suffering from a pretty large youth unemployment rate (something like 15% of young adults in China cannot find work).
Additionally, many of the public transportation routes in China were designed as vanity projects and have never become profitable. A lot of the high speed rail in China cuts through large swathes of uninhabited land and goes out to ghost cities where nobody lives because they were only built to create construction contracts. These rail lines are expensive to maintain and are bleeding money.
Now, of course you’d probably say that public transportation is a public good; they dont need to profit to benefit the country. That may be true, but it also means that the government needs to borrow money in order to subsidize these largely pointless rail lines (think of those maps where people propose a HSR line that goes from New York to California- a largely pointless route that almost nobody would take because it would be a lot faster to just take a plane).
This is not to say that the United States beats China in every category. In my view the United States has become a barely functioning legal fiction on the precipice of disintegration. My point is just that a lot of these things in China are artificially propped up by their relatively centrally planned economy and are designed to feed the egos of politicians. China is coming up on multiple fiscal, economic, and demographic cliffs that will most likely result in the shuttering of lots of these public works projects similar to how Argentina has been forced to shut down large amounts of public services because of decades of poor economic management.
And finally, to be fair, the United States is ALSO coming up on many economic cliffs, and in many ways has already flung itself far off of some of them, resulting in deteriorating fundamental public services such as education, healthcare, housing, public transportation, and regulatory agencies, not to mention the corruption which has also infested all of those
Much of the growth in China is entirely artificial and is basically a glorified jobs program. China builds tons of cities throughout the country to generate construction contracts and keep people employed.
I’d infinitely much rather have meaningful job programs that actually increase the real amount of wealth in the nation (such as public transport and housing) than whatever crisis the west has by building too little housing for people for the last few decades simply to make the cost of the existing real estate go up further so landlords can ask higher rents. What a nightmare, what a disaster. How could anybody shill for this?
I cant find statistics on total occupancy rates, but I never saw a high speed train in China that wasnt mostly full, and they mosty sell out days beforehand, so Im pretty sure that’s just someone making shit up. As far as domestic debt due to infrastructure spending, apply your model to Japan.
Turns our neoliberalism was always full of shit, a jobs program that produces useful infrastructure is infinitely better than leaving people unemployed or subsidizing walmart’s wages.
It’s a well-documented problem, even from Chinese government sources.
In February this year, a group of Chinese commentators said a report by the National Audit Office (NAO) had found that China’s high-speed railway saw an “about 100 billion yuan of total loss”
[…]
The article pointed out that China’s high-speed railway network was 45,000 kilometers at the end of 2023, but only 2,300 kilometers, or 6% of the total, could make a profit. It said that out of all 16 high-speed railway lines, only six in coastal cities are profitable.
It said the most profitable Beijing-Shanghai line will have to spend 20 years recovering its initial investment of 220.9 billion yuan.
[…]
"Since the beginning of 2024, data from many high-speed rail lines have been unsatisfactory,” a Henan-based writer says in an article published in February. “There were very few passengers on weekdays, but the maintenance costs stood high.“
I think you’re thinking of this purely from a political standpoint, and the point I’m making is completely an economic one. This isn’t about China vs. The West - this is just about China. You might think that these rail lines don’t need to make a profit because they provide a public good, but these railways are run by private/state partnerships and their stated goal is to make a profit (they even trade on the stock exchange). If they don’t, it’s likely they will be shuttered
It’s almost as if infrastructure is there to facilitate growth and economy and not to turn a profit.
Do the same math for roads: How many percent of the roads in your country (or any other country) turn a profit?
Do the same with water works, sewage and so on. All these things have benefits far greater than immediate profit.
You need roads so that people can get to work and to places where they can spend money and so that goods can be shipped. And all of these things generate taxes and economic benefit, which in turn finance, among other things, road building.
It would be entirely stupid to think that every piece of infrastructure needs to finance itself and turn a profit, while completely forgetting the actual purpose and benefit of the infrastructure.
These are corporations that run the railroads. They do exist to make a profit. China is not a totally socialist country. they’re pretty market oriented but with a strong centrally planned flavor. Their own stated goal, if you had bothered to read my comment before replying, is to be profitable
If you had bothered to actually read the article and if you had bothered to actually research anything at all about the topic at hand, we probably wouldn’t have the discussion.
The reality is the high speed rail it China is not solvent and is operating at a tremendous loss. That’s just reality. The question is if that loss serves a larger benefit to Chinese society. It’s a gamble either way.
I think people forget that many of the highways in The West™ were created as part of glorified jobs programs too.
These projects run like utter shit now in places where work is tendered out to corporations now of course, because they’re being driven by private bodies whose sole motivation is profit, not the creation of useful infrastructure. In my own country HS2 is a beautiful example of this.
Do you have any clues why privatization was so much more destructive in the UK than Japan? The JNR breakup increased ticket prices, decreased service, and made the system overall much more inefficient (Nagoya has subway, rail, elevated rail, bus, elevated bus, ferry, gondola, run by 16 different companies, tokyo has vital subway lines run by different companies, so you pay nearly the cost of a 24 hour pass for using this one transfer), but regulation and infinite loans stemmed the bleeding. You still have rail service to the boonies, even if its an unmanned platform or a guy who shows up twice a day to check shinkansen tickets. The destruction to the UK rail system seems much more permanent.
Overproduction of commodities is certainly a problem for capitalists. But the workers get to enjoy a lower cost of living. Like I would much prefer we built ghost cities (Chengdu was derided as a ghost city at one point) than have a decades long housing crisis with no signs of improving unless we deport millions of people.
Ok fine: this isn’t about the west. You see a comment about economics and your immediate response is whataboutism because you think this is about politics
It helps that in China you can’t own land. All the land is owned by the government. You only have “use rights” and for a limited time (something like 80 years - I forget the exact number). So when it comes time to build infrastructure the government just tells you to gtfo.
Wait until you hear about the UK! I own the freehold to my land, but technically it’s gramted by the crown, so I could in theory at any moment have my home taken from me.
It’s hard to overstate how much safer and more ethical it is to use eminent domain and fairly compensate someone monetarily for their property than to leave their house in the middle of a highway
That’s besides the point wether you think it’s better or not, it should be the OWNER’s decision as is the case in China.
And not what this rustydomino is pulling out of his ass.
The discussion was about having rights of ownership and on the decision, not anyone’s opinion what is better.
So you’re completely besides the point even if you can’t admit this obvious fact.
I’m sure the developers offered “fair compensation”, you need to demand lot before fucking up the highway design is more economical than meeting their offer.
The main difference here seems to be that the US can compell property owners to accept what they determine is a fair market rate, but another poster informed me that in some cases the chinese can compell people to sell too.
China has stronger property laws than the US, look up stuck nail houses. If the US wants your property, they can eminent domain your shit. In China, developers have literally had to swerve highways around property or build shopping centers around that one person who wont sell
Lies. My family had a factory in Wuxi, China. 2 buildings that were dedicated to dormitories. 4 buildings dedicated to manufacturing promotional products.
We were able to lease the land for 50 years with a 50-year option at the end of the term.
Around year 5, the government decided to turn the main dirt road into a proper road. They took back 1/4 of the land. They just used our area for staging.
About a year after the road was made, they decided to expand the road. They took back now 1/2 of the original land and buildings.
Less than a year after the expansion, they turned the 4 lane road i to a highway. They took the entire land back. My family invested millions of dollars in buildings and infrastructure. We got back pennies on the dollar spent on the investment on compensation.
Huh, if the government has that power, why don’t they use it for stuck nail houses? I talked to a few people in shenzhen who made significant sums selling land to developers.
Different type of ownership due to your family purchasing the land vs inheriting it? Different provinces? Did they compell them by indirect means such as threatening to revoke a business liscense or asking suppliers to pressure them?
I don’t know. Wuxi is significantly smaller than Shenzhen. I think it was around 2 million people at that time.
They didn’t give my parents much of an option. When they did finally take the land away, they did offer to relocate us to another location, but at that time, my family was already struggling from the 2nd loss, my parents just ended up closing the business all together.
that’s not the slave labour that’s building china, just as prison labour isn’t what’s powering the US
the actual productive slave labour is done by regular workers who nominally have “freedom”, just that they don’t actually have a choice if they and their family want to live.
lmao do you think china has an industry of mustache-twirling villains whose job it is to threaten peoples families if they dont work for free? Presumably they work for free to keep their families alive too.
Look to public transit development in Taiwan as an example of how to do it right in a democratic nation. There are still loads of problems but the Taiwanese government can’t just take your land outright. Taipei especially has seen phenomenal growth in its metro development in the last 20 years.
No just any shit, shit that helps everyday people living in their country.
I’m just thinking of the major cities in my U.S. state where the public transit map, before and after, looks like Chengdu in 2010. So as unfortunate as the circumstances are in Toronto, they can be even worse.
I’ve been to urumqi, literally anyone can go there.
Theres no slave labor, its normal industrial farms. Unless youre suggesting the guys driving the combine harvesters or running the factories are secretly enslaved.
If you’re USian - you have vastly more domestic slaves (I think you call them prisoners in for-profit prisons) than Uyghur population. Maybe you should do something about it.
It’s not like workers having to do 2 or 3 jobs in the US just to allow their family to survive are really “free workers”. At least slaves in China seem to benefit the country. In the US, the slaves just benefit big corporations and their shareholders.
China was invaded by Japan before WW2. Look up the Rape of Nanking if you want specifics. Once WW2 ended China had a civil war. The CCP managed to win and Mao Zedong ascended to power. He led the Cultural Revolution which basically eliminated the old ways of China to pave the way, over the bodies of millions of people, for modern China.
All jokes aside, things like this are why China is beating us. I am absolutely not a fan of the Chinese government, but the simple fact is they get shit done.
Much of the growth in China is entirely artificial and is basically a glorified jobs program. China builds tons of cities throughout the country to generate construction contracts and keep people employed. This trend has sort of recently reached a head, and China is now suffering from a pretty large youth unemployment rate (something like 15% of young adults in China cannot find work).
Additionally, many of the public transportation routes in China were designed as vanity projects and have never become profitable. A lot of the high speed rail in China cuts through large swathes of uninhabited land and goes out to ghost cities where nobody lives because they were only built to create construction contracts. These rail lines are expensive to maintain and are bleeding money.
Now, of course you’d probably say that public transportation is a public good; they dont need to profit to benefit the country. That may be true, but it also means that the government needs to borrow money in order to subsidize these largely pointless rail lines (think of those maps where people propose a HSR line that goes from New York to California- a largely pointless route that almost nobody would take because it would be a lot faster to just take a plane).
This is not to say that the United States beats China in every category. In my view the United States has become a barely functioning legal fiction on the precipice of disintegration. My point is just that a lot of these things in China are artificially propped up by their relatively centrally planned economy and are designed to feed the egos of politicians. China is coming up on multiple fiscal, economic, and demographic cliffs that will most likely result in the shuttering of lots of these public works projects similar to how Argentina has been forced to shut down large amounts of public services because of decades of poor economic management.
And finally, to be fair, the United States is ALSO coming up on many economic cliffs, and in many ways has already flung itself far off of some of them, resulting in deteriorating fundamental public services such as education, healthcare, housing, public transportation, and regulatory agencies, not to mention the corruption which has also infested all of those
I’d infinitely much rather have meaningful job programs that actually increase the real amount of wealth in the nation (such as public transport and housing) than whatever crisis the west has by building too little housing for people for the last few decades simply to make the cost of the existing real estate go up further so landlords can ask higher rents. What a nightmare, what a disaster. How could anybody shill for this?
I cant find statistics on total occupancy rates, but I never saw a high speed train in China that wasnt mostly full, and they mosty sell out days beforehand, so Im pretty sure that’s just someone making shit up. As far as domestic debt due to infrastructure spending, apply your model to Japan.
Turns our neoliberalism was always full of shit, a jobs program that produces useful infrastructure is infinitely better than leaving people unemployed or subsidizing walmart’s wages.
https://asiatimes.com/2025/06/chinas-fast-growing-high-speed-railway-network-faces-reality/
It’s a well-documented problem, even from Chinese government sources.
[…]
[…]
I think you’re thinking of this purely from a political standpoint, and the point I’m making is completely an economic one. This isn’t about China vs. The West - this is just about China. You might think that these rail lines don’t need to make a profit because they provide a public good, but these railways are run by private/state partnerships and their stated goal is to make a profit (they even trade on the stock exchange). If they don’t, it’s likely they will be shuttered
It’s almost as if infrastructure is there to facilitate growth and economy and not to turn a profit.
Do the same math for roads: How many percent of the roads in your country (or any other country) turn a profit?
Do the same with water works, sewage and so on. All these things have benefits far greater than immediate profit.
You need roads so that people can get to work and to places where they can spend money and so that goods can be shipped. And all of these things generate taxes and economic benefit, which in turn finance, among other things, road building.
It would be entirely stupid to think that every piece of infrastructure needs to finance itself and turn a profit, while completely forgetting the actual purpose and benefit of the infrastructure.
These are corporations that run the railroads. They do exist to make a profit. China is not a totally socialist country. they’re pretty market oriented but with a strong centrally planned flavor. Their own stated goal, if you had bothered to read my comment before replying, is to be profitable
Ok, let’s assume you read the article. Quiz question: who owns the China State Railway Group Co Ltd? (Hint: it’s in the name)
Also, I guess you didn’t just invent the “stated goal” of the China State Railway Group, so it should be quite easy for you to find said stated goal in their actual stated goals (http://wap.china-railway.com.cn/english/about/aboutUs/201904/t20190408_92993.html), correct?
If you had bothered to actually read the article and if you had bothered to actually research anything at all about the topic at hand, we probably wouldn’t have the discussion.
The reality is the high speed rail it China is not solvent and is operating at a tremendous loss. That’s just reality. The question is if that loss serves a larger benefit to Chinese society. It’s a gamble either way.
I think people forget that many of the highways in The West™ were created as part of glorified jobs programs too.
These projects run like utter shit now in places where work is tendered out to corporations now of course, because they’re being driven by private bodies whose sole motivation is profit, not the creation of useful infrastructure. In my own country HS2 is a beautiful example of this.
Do you have any clues why privatization was so much more destructive in the UK than Japan? The JNR breakup increased ticket prices, decreased service, and made the system overall much more inefficient (Nagoya has subway, rail, elevated rail, bus, elevated bus, ferry, gondola, run by 16 different companies, tokyo has vital subway lines run by different companies, so you pay nearly the cost of a 24 hour pass for using this one transfer), but regulation and infinite loans stemmed the bleeding. You still have rail service to the boonies, even if its an unmanned platform or a guy who shows up twice a day to check shinkansen tickets. The destruction to the UK rail system seems much more permanent.
I think that person’s logic goes like, “government run” = “artificially propped up” = “doesn’t count as real growth”.
It’s the final form of capitalist indoctrination to only be able to reason about other systems through its lens.
I think you didn’t read the original post very well
Overproduction of commodities is certainly a problem for capitalists. But the workers get to enjoy a lower cost of living. Like I would much prefer we built ghost cities (Chengdu was derided as a ghost city at one point) than have a decades long housing crisis with no signs of improving unless we deport millions of people.
At some point, though, when the government keeps running up deficits to subsidize this, the bill comes due
Yeah, sure. China has a debt to GDP of 88.6%. That’s not great. Luckily we don’t have that problem in western capitalist countries, right?
This isn’t about the US. My criticism of the US was pretty clear in the original post
I also didn’t only post numbers for the US.
Ok fine: this isn’t about the west. You see a comment about economics and your immediate response is whataboutism because you think this is about politics
Did you know that most of China’s debt is held domestically?
deleted by creator
LOL thanks for your unfunded BS CIA.
It helps that in China you can’t own land. All the land is owned by the government. You only have “use rights” and for a limited time (something like 80 years - I forget the exact number). So when it comes time to build infrastructure the government just tells you to gtfo.
Wait until you hear about the UK! I own the freehold to my land, but technically it’s gramted by the crown, so I could in theory at any moment have my home taken from me.
Wrong, the state owns the land but you can own the house, and not just for your 70y BS period.
There are plenty of articles like of instances where homeowners don’t want to sell for infrastructure like this: https://twistedsifter.com/2012/11/china-builds-highway-around-house/
I know for a fact here in EU or the US they will indeed " just tells you to gtfo"
BTW, in China a high 90% of people OWN their house and aren’t rentslaves.
So there’s that China bad man.
It’s hard to overstate how much safer and more ethical it is to use eminent domain and fairly compensate someone monetarily for their property than to leave their house in the middle of a highway
That’s besides the point wether you think it’s better or not, it should be the OWNER’s decision as is the case in China.
And not what this rustydomino is pulling out of his ass.
No it’s not besides the point, it’s in direct response to your point. Leaving a house in the middle of the highway is a better outcome for no one
The discussion was about having rights of ownership and on the decision, not anyone’s opinion what is better.
So you’re completely besides the point even if you can’t admit this obvious fact.
I’m sure the developers offered “fair compensation”, you need to demand lot before fucking up the highway design is more economical than meeting their offer.
In the US, the government provides compensation, not developers, and they pay fair market value as determined by local appraisal districts.
The main difference here seems to be that the US can compell property owners to accept what they determine is a fair market rate, but another poster informed me that in some cases the chinese can compell people to sell too.
China has stronger property laws than the US, look up stuck nail houses. If the US wants your property, they can eminent domain your shit. In China, developers have literally had to swerve highways around property or build shopping centers around that one person who wont sell
Lies. My family had a factory in Wuxi, China. 2 buildings that were dedicated to dormitories. 4 buildings dedicated to manufacturing promotional products.
We were able to lease the land for 50 years with a 50-year option at the end of the term.
Around year 5, the government decided to turn the main dirt road into a proper road. They took back 1/4 of the land. They just used our area for staging.
About a year after the road was made, they decided to expand the road. They took back now 1/2 of the original land and buildings.
Less than a year after the expansion, they turned the 4 lane road i to a highway. They took the entire land back. My family invested millions of dollars in buildings and infrastructure. We got back pennies on the dollar spent on the investment on compensation.
My family never fully recovered financially.
Huh, if the government has that power, why don’t they use it for stuck nail houses? I talked to a few people in shenzhen who made significant sums selling land to developers.
Different type of ownership due to your family purchasing the land vs inheriting it? Different provinces? Did they compell them by indirect means such as threatening to revoke a business liscense or asking suppliers to pressure them?
I don’t know. Wuxi is significantly smaller than Shenzhen. I think it was around 2 million people at that time.
They didn’t give my parents much of an option. When they did finally take the land away, they did offer to relocate us to another location, but at that time, my family was already struggling from the 2nd loss, my parents just ended up closing the business all together.
I’m sure that’s the whole story.
America is no different. Try not paying your land tax.
The only difference is that, in America, someone needs to shout “eminent domain!” first and slip you $500 for your house.
Isn’t this post about Canada?
And China has slave labor
I mean so does the United States thanks to the 13th amendment but we don’t have anywhere near the same infrastructure to show for it
American slave labor isn’t used for anything interesting - it’s just letting companies pay less for labor for their own benefit.
And what are the Uighurs making that is so interesting?
that’s not the slave labour that’s building china, just as prison labour isn’t what’s powering the US
the actual productive slave labour is done by regular workers who nominally have “freedom”, just that they don’t actually have a choice if they and their family want to live.
lmao do you think china has an industry of mustache-twirling villains whose job it is to threaten peoples families if they dont work for free? Presumably they work for free to keep their families alive too.
Proof or I don’t believe.
Look to public transit development in Taiwan as an example of how to do it right in a democratic nation. There are still loads of problems but the Taiwanese government can’t just take your land outright. Taipei especially has seen phenomenal growth in its metro development in the last 20 years.
LOL
The government of Taiwan is the Chinese government
No just any shit, shit that helps everyday people living in their country.
I’m just thinking of the major cities in my U.S. state where the public transit map, before and after, looks like Chengdu in 2010. So as unfortunate as the circumstances are in Toronto, they can be even worse.
One of the reasons they can build their future so quickly is because they were left in a unique position after WW2 to effectively destroy their past.
And they have slave labor. Oops, I guess that’s something that shouldn’t be said in a post pandering China
all the big countries have slave labour by any other name, they all fucking suck
I’ve been to urumqi, literally anyone can go there.
Theres no slave labor, its normal industrial farms. Unless youre suggesting the guys driving the combine harvesters or running the factories are secretly enslaved.
The only country I know taht has slave labor is the US and their barbaric Gulf states friend.
But the poor Uyghurs!!! BS propaganda
not a downvote either. guess you didn’t say the magic word.
Uyghurs
The US hates China, hates muslims but pretend to care about those poor Chinese muslims.
I wonder why?
If you’re USian - you have vastly more domestic slaves (I think you call them prisoners in for-profit prisons) than Uyghur population. Maybe you should do something about it.
If you’re not USian, no rebuttal.
It’s not like workers having to do 2 or 3 jobs in the US just to allow their family to survive are really “free workers”. At least slaves in China seem to benefit the country. In the US, the slaves just benefit big corporations and their shareholders.
Don’t compare struggling to make rent to the prisoners picking cotton by hand in Lousiana.
I was not doing any comparison, sorry of this sounded like it.
I’m curious, tell me more about this (actual question, not being sarcastic)
China was invaded by Japan before WW2. Look up the Rape of Nanking if you want specifics. Once WW2 ended China had a civil war. The CCP managed to win and Mao Zedong ascended to power. He led the Cultural Revolution which basically eliminated the old ways of China to pave the way, over the bodies of millions of people, for modern China.