It's easy when you can "re-educate" the NIMBYs after seizing their property like what the U.S. did to native populations when giving their land to railroads in the 19th century back when people's rights, environmental issues, and other such things had no meaning. And, when one runs a dictatorship, the only ones who are allowed to have power are subject to the decisions of the ruling bureau and if that group decides to build roads, airports or trains (easier to control people's movement with trains or planes), it is done or those with lesser power find they have joined those with none.
3x2 seating is very common in Asia in the standard/lower class. Most Asians are not as huge as Americans, who are large partly by nature and partly by excessive consumption and poor dietNotice the 3 and 2 seating on the China trains. Might be a very tight fit for many westerners ?
No insults please. We are just too short for our weight and insulting us because of our height being insufficient can get you an ADA complaint.3x2 seating is very common in Asia in the standard/lower class. Most Asians are not as huge as Americans, who are large partly by nature and partly by excessive consumption and poor diet
... Most Asians are not as huge as Americans, who are large partly by nature and partly by excessive consumption and poor diet
It used to be that most Asians were smaller than Americans because of the poor diet on the part of the Asians. Now the relative sizes are the same, but the Americans are the ones with the poor diet!3x2 seating is very common in Asia in the standard/lower class. Most Asians are not as huge as Americans, who are large partly by nature and partly by excessive consumption and poor diet
The Chinese HSR is sucking blood from every Chinese tax payer. It's a black hole and you don't even know how big the debt is because, there is never a transparency and truth from Communist Party.
This is a common point I hear, but I have never actually seen any evidence to back it up.
If we don't know how big the debt is, how do we know if there is actually a mountain of debt to begin with? Do you have any (reputable and conclusive) sources for your rather bold claims? The most common number I saw tossed around was 770B, but most articles often followed this point with admitting that the older lines began paying for themselves. I read that 5 out of 15 pay for themselves pre-covid.
Continued expansion at this rapid a rate of course would rack up a bill, but the system itself (if they stopped expanding) being a black hole of debt is another claim entirely.
Perhaps China sees this as an investment that pays back in alternate ways. There IS evidence to suggest that China's unbelievable growth in the past 20 years can be attributed in part to their HSR system.
The US interstates also sucked (and continue to do so) a lot of money, but we see it as a necessary investment.
"5 out of 15 pay for themselves pre-covid" is definitely not happening. Other than Jinghu line (Beijing South - Shanghai Hongqiao). You can get a ballpark number from Chinese propaganda , but bear in mind those numbers reported in propaganda are also most likely adjusted to make the government look good. Like how they report death tolls in Wuhan.
Any sources for your other claims?
While it may indeed be true, I always find it a little lazy to blame communism for difficulty to find credible numbers.
Have you yourself been to China? Seems like you have a pretty specific view of the country that informs your opinion about its trains.
Fair enough.I though I put a link is in the last post. Google translate is your friend. Born from China. Grow in China. I know what I’m talking about.
Bottom line is always be skeptical about anything you read about China because most of time people inside China also don’t get truth because of the great firewall.
I will also say that the legal system was more protective of Chinese citizens rights twenty years ago than today. I recall seeing a program on CCTV Chinese state television back in about 2005 about a band of lawyers defending villagers' rights when the government wanted to tear down their village to put up some kind of public works project. Even at the time, I found it amazing that the tenor of the program was favorable to the villagers and the lawyers working to defend their community. This absolutely wouldn't happen today, unfortunately. Xi has stifled any hint of dissent, tragically.
My short visit to Beijing suggested that the place had the density of Manhattan with the sprawl of Chicago. All of the residential development I saw was high rise apartments.I have never been to China myself so cannot say how cities are structures. But i would assume there isn't urban sprawl to the same extent there is in the USA. And maybe a new HSR line might affect a village here and a lonely house there, but you're not trampling on people's houses back to back all the way. The proportion of land that is agricultural or not used at all will probably be considerably higher.
I don't think you'll find a lot of 'open land' in China; at least in the eastern half of China where most of the high speed lines have been and are being constructed. There are over 100 cities with more than a million people in them--the corridors linking those many of those cities have become, practically speaking, megalopolises where one urban zone blends into the next.
Yes, we do forget that our railroads were built by the government seizing native lands. Railroads have extensive eminent domain rights to this day.When I was in Beijing I loved to wander the backstreets (houtongs) and just observe. One thing I noted early on was a red circular stenciled "graffiti" with a couple characters that had been sprayed on several surfaces of some of the houtongs. I asked about it and it was the Party notice that that houtong had been condemned and would be razed within 90 days. There is a process similar to eminent domain but since few people actually owned the land they had a freehold type of contract on (usually limited to 70 years), they usually lose when the Party wanted their land. Very few people actually own land inside a city, the State owns it and leases it back to them for a stipulated time. When the Party bought the land they only paid for the pro-rated amount of the value, so if the family had been there for 50 years they got 20/70th of the purported value. But the process was pretty complicated because Chinese Land Law is really involved.
Upside is that 'backwards' sections of a city could be torn down after several years of planning and a couple months of notice of eviction to the people that live there. The people that were being evicted had usually known for a year or more that the eviction process was probably coming, but some claimed it was a surprise. Take that for what it is worth. The fact that some of the people would talk to me about something that sensitive was interesting in and of itself.
Downside of course is that the people that have lived there for a couple generations have to move on with short notice.
Conversely when I showed a pamphlet given away (at Tiananmen Square) by a distraught father that lost his son in PLA basic training the staff at the hotel ran away and wouldn't come out of hiding until I had been gone for some time. So there are things in China that they can complain about and things that they are not supposed to even see, let alone speak of. The father was grabbed by a squad of police that popped out of a hidden door and pulled him in with them in less than a minute. I got one of the pamphlets that were blown downwind when they nabbed the old gent.
Simplifying eminent domain here would simplify improving rail lines, but I am not sure that we would like the collateral damage.
China has some large advantages when it comes to building train lines.
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