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.
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 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.
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