They opened their first dedicated high speed rail line in 2008
This graph is missing Britain, which has over 2000km of track capable of speeds that are 200kph and above
Yes you read that right, an island the size of Nebraska has more high-speed rail than the entire United States.
Part of the reason for this is because China is a really big country with a really big population. If Brazil, USA, Russia and India built high speed rail like China they would also have thousands of kilometers of track
I’ve heard people try to discredit Chinese rails n such by claiming it’s not “built to last” or whatever. Is there any validity to these claims?
This is a racist dog whistle. It stems from the early 2000’s version of sinophobia where everything that came from China was supposedly cheap garbage. The only way these racists found how to deal with the fact everything you found on Walmart was “Made in China” was to have that response “oh it is cheap plastic low quality garbage anyway”.
You still see people try to apply that logic today, e.g see how Musk’s fans try to deflect the fact China will soon have better Chinese made EVs like the XPeng P7 trying to claim it is “stolen tech” or somehow lower quality.
And then you see remnants of that applied to other stuff. Chinese trains are somehow “not built to last” just like that cheap plastic crap you bought on Walmart 20 years ago. These claims are obviously baseless the Chinese high speed train technology is decades old now and was based on tech transfers and joint ventures from many foreign companies. Even recently a joint venture with Bombardier won a contract to build thousands of high speed train cars.
If these people are really expecting to make a point about short term infrastructure projects then you should question them on why is that even a bad thing if it were true anyway. People will benefit from these projects today whether it needs to be renovated 50 years from now or not is irrelevant the fact is either way it creates jobs, improves the economy and people benefit. Why is it bad to have people working these jobs? Is it better to have 1 billion people sitting on cubicles working spreadsheets for 10h a day instead?
Those who idealize perfectly built infrastructure projects made to last centuries are missing the point. The US road network from WW2 era is completely obsolete and in need of repairs for decades now.
There is a large market for housing in China that prioritizes speed and quantity over quality, and as a result most new houses aren’t built to last more than 75 years, but that’s really no different from the West.
Rails don’t fall apart if your concrete staarts to disintegrate, because they don’t use any. Unlike most of today’s single (and multiple?) unit dwellings, they don’t mold over from the inside out, and it’s pretty economical to make them durable and rustproof. They’re not really the best example of an engineering project that can be messed up.
Usually comes up if we’re on the topic of train gang and I say that China’s government is actually effective at getting rails built, unlike America. They’ll just respond flippantly about Chinese infrastructure projects being “short-term.” One guy I know will point to the Three Gorges Dam specifically.
I know this is very funny and all considering America’s lack of any meaningful infrastructure maintenance or expansion, but is there any validity to claims about short-sighted or high maintenance Chinese infrastructure?
I rode high speed rail from Guangzhou to Guilin once and it was the best train journey of my life. Those things go so fast I couldn’t believe it. It’s specially fun because the displays have a speedometer so you can see how fast the zoom zoom train is going in real time.
