this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2024
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Great example of another tech that is slowly bankrupting China because of it‘s overly excessive but poor implementation. One trillion dollars of debt and rising for a network that is barely used in most parts.
Did you just make that up? According to wikipedia (it cites a chinese-language source I can't read), average occupancy was increasing until 2016, where the statistics end.
But we can infer later occupancy from other statistics:
Passenger trips per year increase every year, with a drop in 2020, but it went back up to 3.68 billion in 2023, 1.6x what it was in 2019 and 3x what it was when occupancy had increased to 72%
There's issues, such as that it tends not to run through city centers, but lack of occupancy doesn't seem like one. In any case, cheap intercity transit is a public good that benefits the whole country. Being able to travel 800 miles in 4 hours for 40 bucks is incredibly convenient.
What next, are you going to claim China is full of ghost cities because building enough housing that everyone can afford it is bad actually?
No you see China's economy has to be failing, if it isn't then it would be a good market to find businesses to invest in. If a large enough segment of the small capitalists -- for whom the great superstructure of American cultural reproduction is geared toward -- began investing heavily in Chinese industry and saw large enough roi, they would structurally oppose anti-Chinese domestic policy. Not to mention other economic consequences like creating a more robust and durable class of small capitalists. If small capitalists felt greater economic security as a result of Chinese investment, it would damage not only the foreign policy aims (war) of a large segment of the ruling class who wants to destroy Chinese (lets call it) political republicanism and raid it for its resources and labor a la early 90s Russia; it would also threaten ideological temperament of small capitalists who inform aspiring small capitalists and legions of lumpen workers, who always feel the pressure of capitalism's natural tendency to crush their classes during economic downturns. If these layers don't feel threatened by China, if the west can't successfully blame them for problems we created, then those layers whose exploitation is so crucial to the various profitability schemes of the ruling class might be more amenable to social democracy or maybe even socialism.
The hate that westerners feel toward China is part fear that we will lose our social status, and part hatred of the conditions that allow Chinese markets to operate successfully and independently of our ruling class. Therefore, the Chinese economy must collapse, any day now...
Ideology is a hell of a drug
None of what you said is even related to the one trillion (and rising) debt in any way. Why don't you stay focused on the argument but instead dump random facts into the discussion?
By the way you literally just have to type "china highspeed rail debt" in any search engine of your choice and get bombarded with facts about it. Why didn't you even try?
Who are they in debt to? Mostly their own state-controlled Industries. So when China is 1 trillion in debt to their productive capabilities they are failing, but when the US is 35 trillion in debt to international finance capital (via the federal reserve) that's a healthy economy.
You said "the network that is barely used in most parts."
I looked it up and showed you that it's used so much they're continuing to expand capacity along most routes.
I didn't bother to address the railroads being run at a deficit because the neoliberal brainrot it requires to think that mass transit must extract a profit is painful to even imagine.
Do you think public roads, buses, and subways should be run for profit too?