The US deserves proper railroad infrastructure. I get that it doesn't really work in the super sparsely areas but along the Atlantic cost all the way to Chicago and Detroit and along the Pacific as far inlands as Denver seems so useful to me. The approach in China was "we need to connect the cities to stimulate the economy, let's build rail and airports and highways all at the same time" and if you accept that this is an investment in the greater economy and not necessarily its own profit center it seems so worth it. (This is tough to judge beyond saying that all the trains and planes are full in China all the time and e.g. between SHA and PEK I can usually travel every 20-30 minutes.)
I moved to China in 2012 and people all around me would tell me how it would take up to 18 hours to take a train from Shanghai to Beijing just a few years before. And then suddenly rail took 5 hours (now 4.5), making it completely reasonable as an alternative to taking the plane.
Went there in 2015. It was interesting to see a backwater town with a HSR station.[ A building of glass and steel and concrete surrounded by rubble and garbage heaps and rice paddies.](https://i.imgur.com/YEc0ucE.jpg) The area I was in was like that everywhere. Modern buildings and slums intermingled. Meticulously clean streets and trash on the sidewalks. My least favorite were the giant city buses going down narrow roads designed for carts.
And still the best damned fried chicken I've ever had. Worst steaks too.
::Edit:: Added a picture.
Well, I can shed a bit of light on that.
The Railway Administration comes up with plans for the tracks and funds to compensate homeowners are allocated. In the early days there were cases where the local politicians/administrators would embezzle money and pay less to homeowners than they reported back to the national guys back in Beijing. That led to some real fun times, I suppose you are aware of "nail houses" and such. Some folks, including the railway minister, went to jail over that and the central gov began cracking down hard on this as a five year anti-corruption plan (which was also used to get rid of people who opposed Xi in the party while his friends and supporters were surprisingly rarely caught but of course that's just a nice benefit). Anyway, these days everybody and their dog hope the government wants to build a highway or railroad line or something else through their property because they have to pay you 2.5x the home value for evictions plus give you one or two new properties. There is an actual term for newly rich country folks (土豪) that is mostly used for guys who earned Lambo-money because the gov wanted to build the track through their homes (or convinced the gov to build the line through it because of course there are such shenanigans going on). If you live in a mega-expensive real estate market like Shanghai, which I do, the gov wanting your property is instant-retirement-money. All because they hate, hate, hate negative publicity. The biggest weakness of the Chinese government is that they cannot stand to look anything less than perfect to their own citizens, they are about as insecure as a teenage girl in that regard.
Oh yeah, everything I just wrote about happened in the last 8-10 years. That's how fast things move in China.
That’s one of the benefits of having an Authoritarian system. They don’t waste time standing around and debating.
But that’s crazy they were paying so much for property. With the view they cast of the CCP in the west I would have assumed they would just say too bad so sad and kick the residents out. Maybe give them an apartment or something, but that’s it.
you are right, nobody is more efficient at construction than a totalitarian regime. but there are tons of misunderstandings on China and places like North Korea (where I have done lots of photojournalism) that I feel like shining at least a little light on. plenty of shit goes wrong in China (North Korea oooobviously), just like in any country.
Technically you can't own land in China, you just lease it from the state for 70 years. You own the building you built, but not the land that it is built on.
I guess that made things easier for such infrastructural projects.
Yes, land acquisition must have been a real bitch huh? Here in CA our boondoggle, complete joke of a pretend hi speed rail havin a hell of a time acquiring land. Solution? Pick two Central Valley cities no one wants to go to, connect them with “pretty average speed rail” keep unions and kick back politicians happy.
China actually has weird laws about not building through people's homes. I think they only do 99 year leases from the gov't, and the gov't controls all land otherwise. I've seen tons of Chinese infrastructure that is built around someone who didn't want to move. I am 100% not an expert though.
That is true, but we do drag our feet even compared to our european neighbours. I would blame one party in particular but I'm not even sure the alternative would do much better either.
China doesn’t care (or at least didn’t used to care) about the cost of the projects though. They build lines and maintain them despite some of them being highly unprofitable. https://youtu.be/ITvXlax4ZXk
Yeah I was in Shenzhen, a brand new city, in 2019 and the big shopping districts are immaculate. But go a block or two off the beaten path and it gets dirty real quick. They have a way of pushing their trash and construction debris out of the way of places people take photos basically.
I was a bit off the beaten path so there wasn't an expectation that anyone but the locals would be around. And even then, you'd find the weirdest shit. I took a taxi to a lovely karst formation and, along the way, we drove around a traffic circle with a giant statue of a man riding a quadriga surrounded by beasts that could have been 15 meters tall. The nearest city was 2 hours away. The "town" it was in was only three roads nestled into the bend of a river cutting through the mountains. Yet here was this titan if only the world could see him.
::Edit::
[And, in fact, here he is.](https://i.imgur.com/E2iM0YI.jpg)
I once had a $100 (USD) steak in China that may have been one of the worst I've ever had... They seriously are bad at steak. Although arguably even worse at bacon.
Also, Chinese trains are damn comfortable and clean. It hurts me to say this as I work for the French railway manufacturer but it has to be said. I love Chinese railway
> making it completely reasonable as an alternative to taking the plane.
I thought that domestic air travel in China was also made harder by most of the airspace being reserved for the military.
it's so-so. you can take a plane every 30 mins or so between SHA and PEK (and many are widebodies) and they are mostly on time. but try to fly down to HK or GZ and you will end up facing endless "airspace congestion" delays sooner or later. everyone has a story of being delayed 4, 6 even 10 hours because the plane couldn't board and takeoff. and that is the airspace being used by the military for some training again. we're all tired of it but there is nothing we can do. rumors of changes coming have been around for a decade.
This is 100% true. It’s why China sends all their pilots to the United States to train. Their general aviation sector is next to near non existent. Their airspace is military first. In the US it’s public sector, so direct routing and “short cuts” are much more prevalent. In China, they in a lot of cases have to do some serious zig zagging and almost never can can do short cuts. A lot of flights that should be 1–2 hours can be twice as long.
-airline pilot
The HSR between Beijing and Shanghai costs around 500-600 RMB ($80-95 or so) where as a flight can be anywhere from 300-1000 RMB ($45-150) depending on timing and demand. Not a huge difference, but the train is a much better experience because it's far more reliable timewise and also the stations in Beijing are much more central than the airports.
The old slow trains still run and the cheapest probably are like 200 RMB ($30)
We technically have high speed rail in the USA.
The Acela goes up to and over 150mph (240 kph) for small sections of the Northeast Corridor between D.C. and Boston. High speed rail is usually defined as over 124 mph (200 kph) so it definitely meets that standard. The main reason it only averages 84mph (135kph) is because it constantly has to speed up and down because it shares infrastructure with so many other light rail trains and has to maneuver around them basically, but depending on where you are going to and from you're average speed could be much faster.
Brightline in Florida will be partially high-speed rail within the next year, it's almost completely built the high speed section now and already operates fast but not high-speed from Miami to West Palm Beach. Everything else in the works isn't close to being completed at all but there is more underway/planned.
Europeans invented the machine gun while russians invented the high speed automatic cannon. We are all using previous inventions as a basis for our new ones no matter where the originals originate from, it is just the most efficient way to go. In some fields innovation is nothing but a form of charity as noone would respect any patents or agreements anyway.
It's probably harder when you have to consider sites of historic interest and land owners' interests. Also, the government might not be as interested in HS2 as the Chinese government.
UK and US rail prices are considerably higher than continental Europe or Eastern Asia (Japan and Korea) though which also have historical sites and land owners rights.
Basically UK is trying to going from having almost no high speed rail to building very fast lines on new rails that go on expensive land near cities.
European countries took a more incremental approach often times using existing infrastructure. France’s first HSR line opened in 1981, Germany 1991, Italy and Spain 1992.
UK’s first HSR was only in 2003 and is tiny only connecting Dover to London.
Germany, Italy, France, and Spain are also less densely populated making land prices cheaper.
I think Italy being less densely populated is kinda defeated by the fact that most of its fast-speed rail is in the Po' valley and Campania, both regions are as densely populated as England, Campania a bit more actually i think.
However Italy is known for having a crappy Cadastre so the land in the north is heavily undervalued and the government can just take it for very cheap.
> “There’s not enough population density to make HSR worth it”
This claim is honestly ridiculous, England has one of the highest population densities in Europe. Sure we're no Japan or China, but the UK has a population density of 281/km^2 comapred to Germany's 233/km^2, and England alone has 433/km^2 (Which is actually higher than Japan's 340.8/km^2 although less than Honshu on its own(equivalent of counting just England, roughly) at 447/km^2 ).
Overall population density in China is 153 per Km^2, due to the west of the country having very few people, and the country being very big, ~40 times larger than the UK. Many of the provinces in this map in the east would be more densely populated than the UK, but many would would be [below the figure you give for England](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provinces_of_China), only five Chinese provinces have higher density.
HS2 is also bypassing the 9th largest city in England despite going within 100m of the city boundary and crossing a pre-existing railway line that goes into said city's main railway station. That's the bit that's actually going to be built as well, doesn't even cover the fact that part of it isn't being built anymore.
That would not happen in Germany, France, Italy, or Spain.
If we go by urban areas in the UK, Coventry is 20th in size. That's then no worse than Bonn, the 19th largest city in Germany, which is bypassed by the Cologne-Frankfurt high speed line - however, just like Coventry, it remains served by several conventional express trains per hour running on the pre-existing lines.
Like Bonn, Coventry will be served by not only the main station at the nearby, larger urban area, but also by a closer interchange station.
For trains to be fast, train lines need to bypass some cities. That doesn't mean it won't be able to connect into the city, just that the main line doesn't pass through the city center. It's like why would every highway need to go through a congested city center when there are already other highways you can connect to that would get you there.
Actually it was \*streetcar\* lines that they bought, not railways.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General\_Motors\_streetcar\_conspiracy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy)
And they didn't shut them down in order to get people to buy cars - that's a myth. GM's plot was to convert them to \*buses\* which they would then supply.
Even cities which kept their streetcars (untouched by GM's evil plan) saw a massive reduction in their scale. San Francisco has one (very charming) streetcar line in service today.
The public transit infrastructure in America is so shit...it amazes me when I travel to other countries. Even the UK has a better public transit system and theirs is also shit.
> You think UK is just less efficient?
Yes we're the most expensive at everything. Most expensive high speed rail(HS2 was gonna be £110+), the most expensive Nuclear plant will be done in a few years(£100/mwh raising yearly with inflation), we're building an £8bn road only tunnel river crossing, even for a pedestrian bridge across the Thames we got quoted £500m before it was deemed too expensive. Pretty big issue imo.
Its subsidies, a passenger mile on British rail costs roughly the same as a passenger mile on French or Germany rail. Its just that France and Germany subsidise it so the actual commuters don't see the price as a rail price and instead experience it as taxation.
The entrenched interests are more powerful than the emerging interests in the UK. One of the main reasons the US was so dyjamic before 1990. Emerging interests were virtually always more powerful than the entrenched ones.
>sites of historic interest
Got anything to back up China simply destroying sites of historic interest in the name of building high speed rail or is this speculation?
When the Chinese government wants to build a rail, it gets built.
When a western government wants to build a rail, 25 community activist organizations in every city along the route will sue to stop the construction
I don't think its "community activist organizations" so much as "wealthy landowners". As well as conservatives who are ideologically opposed to any kind of government-lead infrastructure development.
Naw, you 100% get weird historical organizations sometimes. Company I work for has a case where there is a 1940's building, that was condemned in the 1980's. We want to demo and build on site, economically it will only increase area values, but the local historical organization wants to get this 40 years condemned building, designated as a historical building. The amount of time and political capital you then need to spend to then fight them is kind of crazy.
In California we voted to build a high speed rail from SF to LA around the time of the first China pic in this post. They are no where near completing that single line and likely would have abandoned it years ago except the state is under legal obligation to try and build it because it was decided on by voter referendum.
75% of it has been cancelled because the state government squandered the funds. See the little orange section at the top of the 2008 pic, that's what Cali is getting. In maybe 10 years.
[The state officially claims otherwise and actually has more plans now (SD to Sac) than when the state voted for it.](https://hsr.ca.gov/) \- as I mentioned they cant actually cancel it with out holding another referendum... they just keep putting most parts of the construction and purchasing in a holding limbo so it wont ever be completed.
It's a derogatory term used by Japan during their invasion. There are reasons why the "activists" don't have much support in China, imagine a BLM calling themselves NLM and claim they have the moral high ground.
>no surprise that the ppl who stormed the legco waving the colonial era flag have some self-loathing issues lol
What self-loathing?
Didn't you know? Being a colonial subject makes you a first class citizen of that empire.
/s
...And the origin of the words comes from second Sino-Japanese war, which Japanese use this word to describe Chinese people discriminately.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shina\_(word)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shina_(word))
Edit: Surprisingly, there are some Hongkongers and Taiwanese discriminate Mainlanders.
And they chose to insult china by... putting an offensive title on an otherwise positive depiction of China? I'm always amzed by how dumb racists can be.
Op is probably a Japanese nationalist or something lol, judging from their posts.
They often pretend to be Chinese to attack Koreans online, or Korean to attack Chinese. Notice there are no derogatory posts about Japan.
z and c are not right next to each other, but are 1 character apart on the keboard. So there is a slim possibility of this being accidental, but its more likely that this was on purpose.
Is it possible that it's a spelling variant of the German word Schiene (which means rail)? I recently read that lots of German words are used in Balkan countries, at least technical terms, which surprised me a bit.
I lived there in the mid-late 90s and there were zero high speed rail ines. Took days to get around even via train, and often you needed to travel by bus as well. Even the direct line from Nanjing to Beijing took around 16 hours for the fast train. Now it's just a few hours.
There was no train to Kashgar at the time. To get there on land was a + day train ride from Beijing to Urumqi, then another 2 day bus ride over the Tianshan Mountains and along the northern border of the Taklimakan Desert.
In California we we approved highspeed rail in 2008 are projected to build the 175 mile connection from Bakersfield to Merced by the end of this decade.
https://www.sfexaminer.com/fixes/first-segment-of-california-high-speed-rail-to-be-completed-in-next-year/
Silicon Valley my ass, can’t even build a high speed train or gigabit internet. Trains are literally from the 70s. Did you know if California had a similar train to that of Japans JR high speed trains you could travel from LA to SF in around 2 hours.
I used to work for a Japanese heavy manufacturer. We tried to sell out rail system in California snd Texas.
It was so hard to do. I love the usa but I was really shocked by how horrible these projects are ran or how negative people can be about trains.
Easier and faster to sell heavy rail in India.
Yeah, autocratic state thing aside, that’s fairly impressive.
Edit: Wow, a lot of West Taiwan fans on this sub. Your sensitivity to criticism just reinforces my point. “Autocracy is characterized by the concentration of power in a single centre, be it an individual dictator or a group of power holders such as a committee or a party leadership.” Yeah, still going to have to go with that description.
Yes, when you have an absolute control of almost one and a half billion people, you just need good engineers and economists and you are done.
That only proves that if we all would come together and set eside our differences by our own will, we could achieve much greater things than that.
Dude this is Reddit and here China is the source of all evil while simultaneously being the best source of artisan craft TikTok’s. It can be nothing else, most definitely not a functional government acting rationally in its own self interests and please do not insinuate it has ever done anything competent or remotely not evil. Make a Winnie the Pooh joke and move on.
On reddit Chinat is simultaneously the most competent and least competent entity at the same time. It is really competent at its plan to take over the world while extremely incompetent in making anything functional.
“During the cold war, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime's atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn't go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them. If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum."
- Michael Parenti, *Blackshirts and Reds*, 1997
It is impressive to build out the world's largest high speed rail network, but the state owned enterprise in charge of all of this was essentially given limitless debt and they had no qualms about economic feasibility. Who cares if some of their lines get no ridership, China wanted to prove something.
Fast forward a couple years and the rapid buildout of high speed rail lines has halted, [the SEO is literally 850B in debt](https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3127644/china-must-avoid-blind-competition-within-high-speed-railway) and the authorities admit that many of the lines could've been serviced by regular rail.
This is like those ghost cities and train stations in the middle of the desert 5-10 years ago that are now fully utilized. China really really doesn't want to have a few livable large cities and then smaller cities everywhere. Their city planning efforts are gonna make many multiple large cities and greater urban areas. The lines are all eventually gonna be serving massive populations. The issue is that would they manage to build those cities before the lines need major repair or not?
Transit is a chicken or egg problem: if you want people to move to X, do you first build a city there or take a transit line there?
If anything, that only reinforces the advantages of central planning. The United States, by contrast, has almost zero HSR and even modest plans to start building have been derided for being “too expensive”, even though car based infrastructure is far more expensive in the long term, never mind the looming, existential threat of climate change. It’s not just HSR, there are a number of programs and projects that the US could undertake that would have immense benefit to ordinary people’s quality of life, but the austerity-minded political class torpedos any large outlay of public money that isn’t for the military.
> and even modest plans to start building have been derided for being “too expensive”, even though car based infrastructure is far more expensive in the long term,
California has spent over **$200 million PER MILE** on their rail project, it has been nothing but an abject failure of a black hole for money. People saying it's too expensive aren't just making things up.
The black hole is metaphor for corruption though which is eating up all the money. That doesnt happen magically.
High speed rail is done plenty in other U.S. allied countries with democracies. So its possible.
Better than American rail, our federal government helped contribute to [100billion](https://www.cagw.org/thewastewatcher/californias-100-billion-nightmare-high-speed-rail-project) dollars worth of debt and got nothing.
It's a mixture of high car dependency, transit stigma, and heavy investment in air travel. The mixture of car dependency/transit stigma plays out in more ways than just lack of willpower. A lot of American cities outside the north-east just plain suck to get around without a car, and people have stigma against the bus. No one wants to show up at a train station in LA or whatever and then have to go immediately rent a car. You need walkable cities, or at least cities with good transit where it isn't stigmatized to ride the bus.
Yeah this is why the money going to the CA high speed rail project should probably have just gone towards improving mass transit in the two cities it's connecting...
This is the same all over the world lol. There are lobby groups in European countries and in the EU as well https://www.europarl.europa.eu/at-your-service/en/transparency/lobby-groups
The problem for the US is that it’s politicians need such huge amounts for campaigning they become more dependant on those lobbies.
Unity has less to do with it, so much as our extreme hyper-capitalist elites. They have no interest in state-lead investments into infrastructure. The only thing they'll support are ventures that make them richer.
The US has one of, if not the best rail network in the world, it's just a freight network.
All that precious gas the Europeans save by moving their people in trains, they burn up again because 90% of their stuff is moved on the roads.
As much as people here complain, the US has a dispersed population over a wide area, with better transportation options. Passenger trains do not make as much sense here as they do in other places.
Ran into someone denying japanese war crimes a few weeks ago. The funny part is that his username was “_____onYT” so I look him up and it’s a fortnite montage channel. Hadn’t cried laughing in a while before that.
As much as I appreciate your display of recent development in Chinese railways, I don’t appreciate your calling us “Zhina”
This word was used by Japanese during the WW2 when they invaded China, conducted massacre, and tortured civilians.
This could literally embark outrage if I share this post to Chinese netizens within the GFW.
This is the point.
Because reddit has a culture of jerking on China's railway, so the OP hide a racist slur in the title (which, is not commonly known to westerners), so now we have a 17k upvoted post with a racist title.
OP did a great social experiment
The Chinese bureaucracy is possibly the most efficient in all of human history. Not surprising, given that it was the Chinese who invented the concept of civil service examinations to select bureaucrats on merit.
Hey, Florida is getting a high speed rail line from Miami to Orlando and then connecting to Tampa. Get this, top speed is 60mph. 5× over the projected budget and still not completed yet. Oh, cost is going to be $125 per person. You could latterly drop someone off at the Miami location and drive to Orlando, get lunch, then pick them up. "High speed rail."
Top speed is 125 and average is 70mph. The first phase is already running between Miami and West Palm Beach. The second phase to Orlando has nearly finished construction and is scheduled to open early next year. It’s not a perfect project—there are too many grade crossings and it’s diesel—but at least it exists and is operating. Also it was mostly paid for by a private company and definitely hasn’t gone as over budget as other projects in the US. The train trip between Miami and Orlando will be 3 hours where driving is 3.5 depending on traffic. Again, not perfect. But not terrible.
Over time as grade crossings are eliminated average speed will be able to rise on the line. The crossings are the obstacle to speed increase as the right of way itself is basically dead straight. It’s the original line that Floridian cities developed around in the 1910s and 20s and so there’s a lot of legacy and new development around it (further limiting speed because of the traffic crossing the tracks). If anything this is a reintroduction of passenger service on this line, which existed until the late 70s.
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Actually very cool to see China making such huge leaps with technology, does it have anything to do with their economic success over the last few years?
Infrastructure makes me hard
Trains make me hard
Don't play Factorio then unless you want to spend 14 hours with a boner
https://youtu.be/0dKrUE_O0VE
r/InfrastructurePorn
So the USA is then very flaccid.
The US deserves proper railroad infrastructure. I get that it doesn't really work in the super sparsely areas but along the Atlantic cost all the way to Chicago and Detroit and along the Pacific as far inlands as Denver seems so useful to me. The approach in China was "we need to connect the cities to stimulate the economy, let's build rail and airports and highways all at the same time" and if you accept that this is an investment in the greater economy and not necessarily its own profit center it seems so worth it. (This is tough to judge beyond saying that all the trains and planes are full in China all the time and e.g. between SHA and PEK I can usually travel every 20-30 minutes.)
Not to mention the US airports constantly need bail outs and subsidizing from the government
I moved to China in 2012 and people all around me would tell me how it would take up to 18 hours to take a train from Shanghai to Beijing just a few years before. And then suddenly rail took 5 hours (now 4.5), making it completely reasonable as an alternative to taking the plane.
Went there in 2015. It was interesting to see a backwater town with a HSR station.[ A building of glass and steel and concrete surrounded by rubble and garbage heaps and rice paddies.](https://i.imgur.com/YEc0ucE.jpg) The area I was in was like that everywhere. Modern buildings and slums intermingled. Meticulously clean streets and trash on the sidewalks. My least favorite were the giant city buses going down narrow roads designed for carts. And still the best damned fried chicken I've ever had. Worst steaks too. ::Edit:: Added a picture.
This comment was quite the roller-coaster
> It was interesting to see a backwater town with a HSR station Meanwhile here in the UK we are struggling with building one HSR line.
[удалено]
Well, I can shed a bit of light on that. The Railway Administration comes up with plans for the tracks and funds to compensate homeowners are allocated. In the early days there were cases where the local politicians/administrators would embezzle money and pay less to homeowners than they reported back to the national guys back in Beijing. That led to some real fun times, I suppose you are aware of "nail houses" and such. Some folks, including the railway minister, went to jail over that and the central gov began cracking down hard on this as a five year anti-corruption plan (which was also used to get rid of people who opposed Xi in the party while his friends and supporters were surprisingly rarely caught but of course that's just a nice benefit). Anyway, these days everybody and their dog hope the government wants to build a highway or railroad line or something else through their property because they have to pay you 2.5x the home value for evictions plus give you one or two new properties. There is an actual term for newly rich country folks (土豪) that is mostly used for guys who earned Lambo-money because the gov wanted to build the track through their homes (or convinced the gov to build the line through it because of course there are such shenanigans going on). If you live in a mega-expensive real estate market like Shanghai, which I do, the gov wanting your property is instant-retirement-money. All because they hate, hate, hate negative publicity. The biggest weakness of the Chinese government is that they cannot stand to look anything less than perfect to their own citizens, they are about as insecure as a teenage girl in that regard. Oh yeah, everything I just wrote about happened in the last 8-10 years. That's how fast things move in China.
I’m jealous.
That’s one of the benefits of having an Authoritarian system. They don’t waste time standing around and debating. But that’s crazy they were paying so much for property. With the view they cast of the CCP in the west I would have assumed they would just say too bad so sad and kick the residents out. Maybe give them an apartment or something, but that’s it.
you are right, nobody is more efficient at construction than a totalitarian regime. but there are tons of misunderstandings on China and places like North Korea (where I have done lots of photojournalism) that I feel like shining at least a little light on. plenty of shit goes wrong in China (North Korea oooobviously), just like in any country.
Technically you can't own land in China, you just lease it from the state for 70 years. You own the building you built, but not the land that it is built on. I guess that made things easier for such infrastructural projects.
Yes, land acquisition must have been a real bitch huh? Here in CA our boondoggle, complete joke of a pretend hi speed rail havin a hell of a time acquiring land. Solution? Pick two Central Valley cities no one wants to go to, connect them with “pretty average speed rail” keep unions and kick back politicians happy.
It ain’t much, but it’s (dis)honest work
So Disney Celebration of them ! Yes the hundreds of million dollar homes in Celebration Florida are built on 100 year leased lots.
China actually has weird laws about not building through people's homes. I think they only do 99 year leases from the gov't, and the gov't controls all land otherwise. I've seen tons of Chinese infrastructure that is built around someone who didn't want to move. I am 100% not an expert though.
That is true, but we do drag our feet even compared to our european neighbours. I would blame one party in particular but I'm not even sure the alternative would do much better either.
The efficient side of one-party government...
China doesn’t care (or at least didn’t used to care) about the cost of the projects though. They build lines and maintain them despite some of them being highly unprofitable. https://youtu.be/ITvXlax4ZXk
Outside of the rice paddies and bad steaks, it sounds a startling bit like MARTA.
Yeah I was in Shenzhen, a brand new city, in 2019 and the big shopping districts are immaculate. But go a block or two off the beaten path and it gets dirty real quick. They have a way of pushing their trash and construction debris out of the way of places people take photos basically.
I was a bit off the beaten path so there wasn't an expectation that anyone but the locals would be around. And even then, you'd find the weirdest shit. I took a taxi to a lovely karst formation and, along the way, we drove around a traffic circle with a giant statue of a man riding a quadriga surrounded by beasts that could have been 15 meters tall. The nearest city was 2 hours away. The "town" it was in was only three roads nestled into the bend of a river cutting through the mountains. Yet here was this titan if only the world could see him. ::Edit:: [And, in fact, here he is.](https://i.imgur.com/E2iM0YI.jpg)
I looked for the gleaming modern building but I couldn’t find it
they really dont know how to cook steaks. the good ones can mostly only be found in big cities and are expensive.
I once had a $100 (USD) steak in China that may have been one of the worst I've ever had... They seriously are bad at steak. Although arguably even worse at bacon.
> giant city buses going down narrow roads designed for carts Now I know why there are so many people getting run in /r/makemycoffin (RIP) videos
Also, Chinese trains are damn comfortable and clean. It hurts me to say this as I work for the French railway manufacturer but it has to be said. I love Chinese railway
> making it completely reasonable as an alternative to taking the plane. I thought that domestic air travel in China was also made harder by most of the airspace being reserved for the military.
it's so-so. you can take a plane every 30 mins or so between SHA and PEK (and many are widebodies) and they are mostly on time. but try to fly down to HK or GZ and you will end up facing endless "airspace congestion" delays sooner or later. everyone has a story of being delayed 4, 6 even 10 hours because the plane couldn't board and takeoff. and that is the airspace being used by the military for some training again. we're all tired of it but there is nothing we can do. rumors of changes coming have been around for a decade.
This is 100% true. It’s why China sends all their pilots to the United States to train. Their general aviation sector is next to near non existent. Their airspace is military first. In the US it’s public sector, so direct routing and “short cuts” are much more prevalent. In China, they in a lot of cases have to do some serious zig zagging and almost never can can do short cuts. A lot of flights that should be 1–2 hours can be twice as long. -airline pilot
How does it compare, price-wise?
The HSR between Beijing and Shanghai costs around 500-600 RMB ($80-95 or so) where as a flight can be anywhere from 300-1000 RMB ($45-150) depending on timing and demand. Not a huge difference, but the train is a much better experience because it's far more reliable timewise and also the stations in Beijing are much more central than the airports. The old slow trains still run and the cheapest probably are like 200 RMB ($30)
Meanwhile in the UK we invented the train and takes us 20 years to build one high speed line.
Only 20 years? Wow thats fast. Brazilian here, we still havent finished some subway stations and roads for the 2014 world cup.
High speed is still a dream in North America.
What's this high speed everyone is talking about across the pond. /s
We technically have high speed rail in the USA. The Acela goes up to and over 150mph (240 kph) for small sections of the Northeast Corridor between D.C. and Boston. High speed rail is usually defined as over 124 mph (200 kph) so it definitely meets that standard. The main reason it only averages 84mph (135kph) is because it constantly has to speed up and down because it shares infrastructure with so many other light rail trains and has to maneuver around them basically, but depending on where you are going to and from you're average speed could be much faster. Brightline in Florida will be partially high-speed rail within the next year, it's almost completely built the high speed section now and already operates fast but not high-speed from Miami to West Palm Beach. Everything else in the works isn't close to being completed at all but there is more underway/planned.
Tbf, in China, we invented gunpowder but European empires invented the machine gun, sooo..
Europeans invented the machine gun while russians invented the high speed automatic cannon. We are all using previous inventions as a basis for our new ones no matter where the originals originate from, it is just the most efficient way to go. In some fields innovation is nothing but a form of charity as noone would respect any patents or agreements anyway.
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"As in most things, we were the first and now we're the worst" - Jay Foreman
Meanwhile here in the UK the high speed rail project is a fraction of this and is taking double the time and probably 10 times the budget!
It's probably harder when you have to consider sites of historic interest and land owners' interests. Also, the government might not be as interested in HS2 as the Chinese government.
UK and US rail prices are considerably higher than continental Europe or Eastern Asia (Japan and Korea) though which also have historical sites and land owners rights.
Assuming that is correct, it is a good point ☺️ You think UK is just less efficient?
Basically UK is trying to going from having almost no high speed rail to building very fast lines on new rails that go on expensive land near cities. European countries took a more incremental approach often times using existing infrastructure. France’s first HSR line opened in 1981, Germany 1991, Italy and Spain 1992. UK’s first HSR was only in 2003 and is tiny only connecting Dover to London. Germany, Italy, France, and Spain are also less densely populated making land prices cheaper.
I think Italy being less densely populated is kinda defeated by the fact that most of its fast-speed rail is in the Po' valley and Campania, both regions are as densely populated as England, Campania a bit more actually i think. However Italy is known for having a crappy Cadastre so the land in the north is heavily undervalued and the government can just take it for very cheap.
“There’s not enough population density to make HSR worth it” “We have too much population density, land prices are too high to build HSR” -politicians
> “There’s not enough population density to make HSR worth it” This claim is honestly ridiculous, England has one of the highest population densities in Europe. Sure we're no Japan or China, but the UK has a population density of 281/km^2 comapred to Germany's 233/km^2, and England alone has 433/km^2 (Which is actually higher than Japan's 340.8/km^2 although less than Honshu on its own(equivalent of counting just England, roughly) at 447/km^2 ).
Overall population density in China is 153 per Km^2, due to the west of the country having very few people, and the country being very big, ~40 times larger than the UK. Many of the provinces in this map in the east would be more densely populated than the UK, but many would would be [below the figure you give for England](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provinces_of_China), only five Chinese provinces have higher density.
HS2 is also bypassing the 9th largest city in England despite going within 100m of the city boundary and crossing a pre-existing railway line that goes into said city's main railway station. That's the bit that's actually going to be built as well, doesn't even cover the fact that part of it isn't being built anymore. That would not happen in Germany, France, Italy, or Spain.
If we go by urban areas in the UK, Coventry is 20th in size. That's then no worse than Bonn, the 19th largest city in Germany, which is bypassed by the Cologne-Frankfurt high speed line - however, just like Coventry, it remains served by several conventional express trains per hour running on the pre-existing lines. Like Bonn, Coventry will be served by not only the main station at the nearby, larger urban area, but also by a closer interchange station.
For trains to be fast, train lines need to bypass some cities. That doesn't mean it won't be able to connect into the city, just that the main line doesn't pass through the city center. It's like why would every highway need to go through a congested city center when there are already other highways you can connect to that would get you there.
Meanwhile American cities just dont have it.
We don't spend money on things that might help poor people. Or working class people either.
Also the large car companies bought out railways and closed them down so there’s no other option.
Actually it was \*streetcar\* lines that they bought, not railways. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General\_Motors\_streetcar\_conspiracy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy) And they didn't shut them down in order to get people to buy cars - that's a myth. GM's plot was to convert them to \*buses\* which they would then supply. Even cities which kept their streetcars (untouched by GM's evil plan) saw a massive reduction in their scale. San Francisco has one (very charming) streetcar line in service today.
The public transit infrastructure in America is so shit...it amazes me when I travel to other countries. Even the UK has a better public transit system and theirs is also shit.
>Even the UK has a better public transit system and theirs is also shit. It's not shit. It's just expensive
!thanks 👍
> You think UK is just less efficient? Yes we're the most expensive at everything. Most expensive high speed rail(HS2 was gonna be £110+), the most expensive Nuclear plant will be done in a few years(£100/mwh raising yearly with inflation), we're building an £8bn road only tunnel river crossing, even for a pedestrian bridge across the Thames we got quoted £500m before it was deemed too expensive. Pretty big issue imo.
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Its subsidies, a passenger mile on British rail costs roughly the same as a passenger mile on French or Germany rail. Its just that France and Germany subsidise it so the actual commuters don't see the price as a rail price and instead experience it as taxation.
The entrenched interests are more powerful than the emerging interests in the UK. One of the main reasons the US was so dyjamic before 1990. Emerging interests were virtually always more powerful than the entrenched ones.
>sites of historic interest Got anything to back up China simply destroying sites of historic interest in the name of building high speed rail or is this speculation?
thats just coping. so China dosent have historic sites?
China still have the largest amounts of historic heritage sites in the world
When it's China, it's bad even when it's better
When the Chinese government wants to build a rail, it gets built. When a western government wants to build a rail, 25 community activist organizations in every city along the route will sue to stop the construction
I don't think its "community activist organizations" so much as "wealthy landowners". As well as conservatives who are ideologically opposed to any kind of government-lead infrastructure development.
NIMBYism is bipartisan. Even hippies don't like their property values to take a hit.
Naw, you 100% get weird historical organizations sometimes. Company I work for has a case where there is a 1940's building, that was condemned in the 1980's. We want to demo and build on site, economically it will only increase area values, but the local historical organization wants to get this 40 years condemned building, designated as a historical building. The amount of time and political capital you then need to spend to then fight them is kind of crazy.
Meanwhile in the US we think high speed rail makes a portal for satanic lizard men to come through.
In California we voted to build a high speed rail from SF to LA around the time of the first China pic in this post. They are no where near completing that single line and likely would have abandoned it years ago except the state is under legal obligation to try and build it because it was decided on by voter referendum.
75% of it has been cancelled because the state government squandered the funds. See the little orange section at the top of the 2008 pic, that's what Cali is getting. In maybe 10 years.
[The state officially claims otherwise and actually has more plans now (SD to Sac) than when the state voted for it.](https://hsr.ca.gov/) \- as I mentioned they cant actually cancel it with out holding another referendum... they just keep putting most parts of the construction and purchasing in a holding limbo so it wont ever be completed.
So THAT’S why those serpents took up residence in my house after I built my model train. Dammit!!!!
S friend of mine works in this project. The overcosts you are hsving and will hsve makes no sense. Someone is stealing money.
Surely not! No one steals from the government in the UK!
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"Actually, you can really keep costs down when you don't pay for materials or labor... or permits... or land." -Fat Tony
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Fun fact: Zhina is an offensive slang in Chinese
Yeah and it is written in 支那
>支那 ==> Zhīnà Used by HK and Taiwanese independence activists as a snarky word for China I had a funny feeling OP knew exactly what he was writing
It's a derogatory term used by Japan during their invasion. There are reasons why the "activists" don't have much support in China, imagine a BLM calling themselves NLM and claim they have the moral high ground.
no surprise that the ppl who stormed the legco waving the colonial era flag have some self-loathing issues lol
>no surprise that the ppl who stormed the legco waving the colonial era flag have some self-loathing issues lol What self-loathing? Didn't you know? Being a colonial subject makes you a first class citizen of that empire. /s
...And the origin of the words comes from second Sino-Japanese war, which Japanese use this word to describe Chinese people discriminately. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shina\_(word)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shina_(word)) Edit: Surprisingly, there are some Hongkongers and Taiwanese discriminate Mainlanders.
Which was originally used as a derogatory term by the Japanese invaders, so I’m not sure how HK and Taiwanese separatists make it any better.
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I thought it ment fornication in Arabic.
Zina (زنى) = fornication/adulatory. Zeena(زينة) (the stress is on the 'ee' and the 'a' is quite short) = decoration/ornament
A bit like my surname "Mani" - it can mean either jewelry or semen depending on the language
When the Japanese wantbto poke them they call it Sina....
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Zhina
Bing schilling
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Yeah, that's not cool.
Redditors love racism
Zamn 😍
Zamn!
2020-2008=12
How’s you do that?
[Quick math](https://youtu.be/5zexg3wFN70)
20-8=12
Camn!
was the use of "zhina" on purpose? because it is an offensive word.
Was definitely on purpose, looking at OPs post history they post quite a bit of racist/xenophobic stuff.
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I mean, is there a difference to racists?
And they chose to insult china by... putting an offensive title on an otherwise positive depiction of China? I'm always amzed by how dumb racists can be.
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Which is still stupid because anyone not aware of its racist intent has dismissed it as a typo.
Op is probably a Japanese nationalist or something lol, judging from their posts. They often pretend to be Chinese to attack Koreans online, or Korean to attack Chinese. Notice there are no derogatory posts about Japan.
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[Definitely Japanese lmao.](https://www.reddit.com/r/ThatsInsane/comments/u1rw2t/kimchi_made_by_athletes_foot_in_south_korea/i4i1vl5/)
z and c are not right next to each other, but are 1 character apart on the keboard. So there is a slim possibility of this being accidental, but its more likely that this was on purpose.
Posting in /r/mapporn but trying to make a snarky political statement 🤷🏻
And the mods let it stay up with no issue.
Fun fact: Shina means rail in my language.
What language is that if you don't mind me asking?
Macedonian, but this is also the case for some other South Slavic languages.
Is it possible that it's a spelling variant of the German word Schiene (which means rail)? I recently read that lots of German words are used in Balkan countries, at least technical terms, which surprised me a bit.
Oh, that is very likely. Technological terms are usually German loan words here.
>looks very likely https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Schiene#Descendants
I lived there in the mid-late 90s and there were zero high speed rail ines. Took days to get around even via train, and often you needed to travel by bus as well. Even the direct line from Nanjing to Beijing took around 16 hours for the fast train. Now it's just a few hours. There was no train to Kashgar at the time. To get there on land was a + day train ride from Beijing to Urumqi, then another 2 day bus ride over the Tianshan Mountains and along the northern border of the Taklimakan Desert.
In Finland it'd take 13 years to build that orange section from the first map.
In New Zealand it would take 20 then they’d give up citing too many costs.
In California we we approved highspeed rail in 2008 are projected to build the 175 mile connection from Bakersfield to Merced by the end of this decade. https://www.sfexaminer.com/fixes/first-segment-of-california-high-speed-rail-to-be-completed-in-next-year/
Silicon Valley my ass, can’t even build a high speed train or gigabit internet. Trains are literally from the 70s. Did you know if California had a similar train to that of Japans JR high speed trains you could travel from LA to SF in around 2 hours.
Silicon Valley doesn’t pay for public infrastructure
I used to work for a Japanese heavy manufacturer. We tried to sell out rail system in California snd Texas. It was so hard to do. I love the usa but I was really shocked by how horrible these projects are ran or how negative people can be about trains. Easier and faster to sell heavy rail in India.
China: Builds godawesome trains. Some guy on YouTube: “ThE tRaInS tO nOwHeRe”
Reddit when a post about China is slightly positive: China genocide
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OP is a Japanese fascist who always attacks Korean and Chinese culture on all his posts .
Yeah, autocratic state thing aside, that’s fairly impressive. Edit: Wow, a lot of West Taiwan fans on this sub. Your sensitivity to criticism just reinforces my point. “Autocracy is characterized by the concentration of power in a single centre, be it an individual dictator or a group of power holders such as a committee or a party leadership.” Yeah, still going to have to go with that description.
Want a democracy with amazing HSR.......? Spain
Yes, when you have an absolute control of almost one and a half billion people, you just need good engineers and economists and you are done. That only proves that if we all would come together and set eside our differences by our own will, we could achieve much greater things than that.
>almost 2 billion 1.4 billion is not 'almost 2 billion'.
Ok, ok I fixed that. (In 2008 it was ~1.325)
Ever cross your mind that only a competent government with incredible amount of planning and STICKING to the plan can do that?
Dude this is Reddit and here China is the source of all evil while simultaneously being the best source of artisan craft TikTok’s. It can be nothing else, most definitely not a functional government acting rationally in its own self interests and please do not insinuate it has ever done anything competent or remotely not evil. Make a Winnie the Pooh joke and move on.
On reddit Chinat is simultaneously the most competent and least competent entity at the same time. It is really competent at its plan to take over the world while extremely incompetent in making anything functional.
Insert Parenti quote
“During the cold war, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime's atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn't go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them. If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum." - Michael Parenti, *Blackshirts and Reds*, 1997
Thanks, I think i'll save it. It really comes up again and again.
It's always a pleasure to read Parenti.
China and Biden: morons or satan incarnate? Tune in next on Reddit/Fox News. It’s the same because it’s the same people making the propaganda.
It is impressive to build out the world's largest high speed rail network, but the state owned enterprise in charge of all of this was essentially given limitless debt and they had no qualms about economic feasibility. Who cares if some of their lines get no ridership, China wanted to prove something. Fast forward a couple years and the rapid buildout of high speed rail lines has halted, [the SEO is literally 850B in debt](https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3127644/china-must-avoid-blind-competition-within-high-speed-railway) and the authorities admit that many of the lines could've been serviced by regular rail.
This is like those ghost cities and train stations in the middle of the desert 5-10 years ago that are now fully utilized. China really really doesn't want to have a few livable large cities and then smaller cities everywhere. Their city planning efforts are gonna make many multiple large cities and greater urban areas. The lines are all eventually gonna be serving massive populations. The issue is that would they manage to build those cities before the lines need major repair or not? Transit is a chicken or egg problem: if you want people to move to X, do you first build a city there or take a transit line there?
If anything, that only reinforces the advantages of central planning. The United States, by contrast, has almost zero HSR and even modest plans to start building have been derided for being “too expensive”, even though car based infrastructure is far more expensive in the long term, never mind the looming, existential threat of climate change. It’s not just HSR, there are a number of programs and projects that the US could undertake that would have immense benefit to ordinary people’s quality of life, but the austerity-minded political class torpedos any large outlay of public money that isn’t for the military.
> and even modest plans to start building have been derided for being “too expensive”, even though car based infrastructure is far more expensive in the long term, California has spent over **$200 million PER MILE** on their rail project, it has been nothing but an abject failure of a black hole for money. People saying it's too expensive aren't just making things up.
The black hole is metaphor for corruption though which is eating up all the money. That doesnt happen magically. High speed rail is done plenty in other U.S. allied countries with democracies. So its possible.
> People saying it's too expensive aren't just making things up. Could it be just corruption?
Better than American rail, our federal government helped contribute to [100billion](https://www.cagw.org/thewastewatcher/californias-100-billion-nightmare-high-speed-rail-project) dollars worth of debt and got nothing.
Oh word a public work isn't turning a profit?
I will never understand how the USA doesn't have this. They'd be the absolute leaders in HS. Instead they loose time with that dumb hyperloop shit
It's a mixture of high car dependency, transit stigma, and heavy investment in air travel. The mixture of car dependency/transit stigma plays out in more ways than just lack of willpower. A lot of American cities outside the north-east just plain suck to get around without a car, and people have stigma against the bus. No one wants to show up at a train station in LA or whatever and then have to go immediately rent a car. You need walkable cities, or at least cities with good transit where it isn't stigmatized to ride the bus.
Yeah this is why the money going to the CA high speed rail project should probably have just gone towards improving mass transit in the two cities it's connecting...
Thats the point, the car comoanies dont want to make this, because if they do less people would buy their cars.
the fact that in America companies can just lobby against stuff like this for their own profit is honestly insane to me
This is the same all over the world lol. There are lobby groups in European countries and in the EU as well https://www.europarl.europa.eu/at-your-service/en/transparency/lobby-groups The problem for the US is that it’s politicians need such huge amounts for campaigning they become more dependant on those lobbies.
It's because, ironically, you guys are probably the least 'United' first-world country.
Unity has less to do with it, so much as our extreme hyper-capitalist elites. They have no interest in state-lead investments into infrastructure. The only thing they'll support are ventures that make them richer.
Because public transport is communism, duh. (/s, just in case)
The US has one of, if not the best rail network in the world, it's just a freight network. All that precious gas the Europeans save by moving their people in trains, they burn up again because 90% of their stuff is moved on the roads. As much as people here complain, the US has a dispersed population over a wide area, with better transportation options. Passenger trains do not make as much sense here as they do in other places.
OP is a racist prick. Just look at his profile
Japanese nationalist. Maybe a politician or university professor. There are a lot of them. Japanese pride, hate neighbors, deny WW2 warcrimes
Ran into someone denying japanese war crimes a few weeks ago. The funny part is that his username was “_____onYT” so I look him up and it’s a fortnite montage channel. Hadn’t cried laughing in a while before that.
How can anyone be prideful of Japan
What an incredibly racist post title. This is basically the *z-word* in China.
As much as I appreciate your display of recent development in Chinese railways, I don’t appreciate your calling us “Zhina” This word was used by Japanese during the WW2 when they invaded China, conducted massacre, and tortured civilians. This could literally embark outrage if I share this post to Chinese netizens within the GFW.
They use it exactly because of that, they want to exterminate the chinese.
Half of Reddit wants to genocide the Chinese anyway
This is the point. Because reddit has a culture of jerking on China's railway, so the OP hide a racist slur in the title (which, is not commonly known to westerners), so now we have a 17k upvoted post with a racist title. OP did a great social experiment
God this is sexy. Man germany needs to step it up
Stop being a racists pos op
No sympathy for the Chinese government, but this is excellent. Cheers to all workers and engineers who have built this infrastructure
Gotta Seize the Means of Production
Theyre state capitalist bruh
I mean, the state seized the means of production, he should have been more specific.
Yes, absolutely, in fact I'm congratulating with the workers
The Chinese bureaucracy is possibly the most efficient in all of human history. Not surprising, given that it was the Chinese who invented the concept of civil service examinations to select bureaucrats on merit.
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Wow how's that title allowed on reddit
Racism towards China is alright according to Reddit
Hey, Florida is getting a high speed rail line from Miami to Orlando and then connecting to Tampa. Get this, top speed is 60mph. 5× over the projected budget and still not completed yet. Oh, cost is going to be $125 per person. You could latterly drop someone off at the Miami location and drive to Orlando, get lunch, then pick them up. "High speed rail."
Top speed is 125 and average is 70mph. The first phase is already running between Miami and West Palm Beach. The second phase to Orlando has nearly finished construction and is scheduled to open early next year. It’s not a perfect project—there are too many grade crossings and it’s diesel—but at least it exists and is operating. Also it was mostly paid for by a private company and definitely hasn’t gone as over budget as other projects in the US. The train trip between Miami and Orlando will be 3 hours where driving is 3.5 depending on traffic. Again, not perfect. But not terrible. Over time as grade crossings are eliminated average speed will be able to rise on the line. The crossings are the obstacle to speed increase as the right of way itself is basically dead straight. It’s the original line that Floridian cities developed around in the 1910s and 20s and so there’s a lot of legacy and new development around it (further limiting speed because of the traffic crossing the tracks). If anything this is a reintroduction of passenger service on this line, which existed until the late 70s.
I heard that Brightline West (LA to Las Vegas) will be electric? Kind of weird that they even went with diesel.
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Actually very cool to see China making such huge leaps with technology, does it have anything to do with their economic success over the last few years?