Imagine you’re lost in the Chinese wilderness

“I can smell the train tracks!”

The CCP think of everything

There are more Chinese people living on less than $10 per day than total Americans.

The median household income is close to 1/10th of the US amount.

The US poverty situation simply cannot compare.

There’s a train in Belgium with an open hole for the bathroom? What year was this in?

The train is for city folk to get between cities, rural folk can’t afford it.

How does that make it any better that the Chinese government lets it happen?

Actually foxconn makes a ton of the low-cost android and android go phones used in China, India, Indonesia, and Africa. Many of the phones made by foxconn (like HMD/Nokia for example) barely register as having sold units in the US.

It can be true. There are more Chinese people living on less than $10 per day than there are total Americans.

Can’t say anything about quality issues.

I can say a few things about the economics. It doesn’t matter whether some or all of this rail is economical or not. Countless infrastructure projects around the world are built without them being economical. The half-a-trillion US interstate highway network was likely not economical either. Infrastructure like that has two important purposes. One’s to support future use. Given the speed with which cities have appeared and filled with people in China, or expanded in the US, a rail line or a large highway corridor support this urbanization. Urbanization creates significant economic growth. The other purpose is finding work for people who then spend their wages in the rest of the economy. So long as there isn’t shortage in real resources - people, concrete, iron, etc. - spending money for this increases domestic consumption and therefore economic growth. Functionally doesn’t matter if the money was created via debt or printed. You can cancel or pay that debt by printing the amount. The debt is typically created out of thin air anyways. Western counties used to this too prior to the neoliberal era when there was slack in the economy. These days we have a lot of bullshit jobs that serve a similar purpose. I think both things considered, HSR buildout in China is solid long term planning, despite of its growing pains.

On what’s high speed rail, I’m thinking ETR500/1000 like the Frecciarossa 1000 in Italy. Those regularly go at 300kph. Looking at Amtrak’s wiki:

Amtrak’s network includes over 500 stations along 21,400 miles (34,000 km) of track. It directly owns approximately 623 miles (1,003 km) of this track and operates an additional 132 miles of track; the remaining mileage is over rail lines owned by other railroad companies. While most track speeds are limited to 79 mph (127 km/h) or less, several lines have been upgraded to support top speeds of 110 mph (180 km/h), and parts of the Northeast Corridor support top speeds of 160 mph (260 km/h).

It seems only parts of the Northeast Corridor get close to that. There’s plenty of geographic high speed rail opportunity in the US that would eliminate short haul flights which have the worst carbon footprint of all flights. There’s no public investment appetite for it. There’s barely enough public funding to maintain the existing roadway infrastructure. Plus I’m sure airlines donate good money to government officials to ensure HSR isn’t a threat to their profits.