Major one missing: China built 5,000 miles of high speed rail in 6 years. In California, it's been 15 years and we have 0 miles complete. Also built numerous hospitals during pandemic in a couple weeks. Demolished and replaced a bridge in 43 hours: https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a.... General pattern of completing infrastructure projects at a blistering pace - and they work.
Also landed a rover on Mars in 2021 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhurong_(rover), but I"m not sure how it compares development speed to NASA. Designed for 90 days, lasted 4x that.
As much as the US denigrates China for allegedly trampling on "freedoms," I bet our way of doing speedy big projects in the past has a lot in common with China's current progress. You just have to quash special interests sometime. Autocracy gets shit done.
It would be interesting to look at a wider range of metrics for some of these fast vs. slow projects.
Safety: Did the fast projects result in more injuries or deaths?
Social: Willingly vs. unwilling participation. IE seized land vs. sold willingly at market rate. Coerced by gov to help build the hospital vs. paid market labor rate.
Environmental: Much easier to design and build a hydro dam when you don't need to worry about still allowing the Salmon to swim upstream.
Safety: "(2022) No major accidents occurred in the field of highway and water transport engineering construction throughout the year. There were 47 safety production accidents, causing 61 deaths. This represents a decrease of 26.6% and 32.2% respectively compared to the previous year." [1] Based on the context, this includes all infrastructure construction such as roads and rails. There were 61 fatalities in 2022, which was lower than previous years. There have been increasingly stringent regulations on workplace safety in recent years, which have resulted in a significant reduction in deaths and accidents. However, there is still room for improvement. For comparison (though the definitions may not be identical) in US, "From 2003-2020, 2,222 workers lost their lives at road construction sites—an average of 123 per year." [2]
Social: There was no "coercion" by the government to help build the hospital. The workers who built the hospital were paid over 10,000 CNY for 8 days of work [3]. Despite the need to work extended hours to expedite the process, possibly from 8 am to 12 am, it should be noted that the market rate for a month's work for typical construction workers under normal working hours is approximately 8,000 CNY.
Environmental: The most recent 16kMGW hydrodam at Baihetan received approval from the National Bureau of Environmental Protection despite potential negative impacts on the ecosystem. Various ecological and environmental measures were implemented to mitigate these impacts [4]. This approach contrasts markedly with that of the West or areas heavily influenced by the West like Hong Kong, where a small environmental group can obstruct major projects. China adopts a holistic approach, balancing economic needs with environmental concerns through different stages of development. China believes that as it develops, it can impose higher standards. For instance, until 2018, China imported plastic waste from the West, but halted this practice to the dismay of many Westerners [5].
I too admire how the PRC gets things done, but how is this different from “trust the government, we know best”?
> This approach contrasts markedly with that of the West or areas heavily influenced by the West like Hong Kong, where a small environmental group can obstruct major projects. China adopts a holistic approach, balancing economic needs with environmental concerns through different stages of development.
This is a vast topic. In brief, the relationship between the Chinese people and their government is markedly different from that in the US due to their distinct histories and cultures. The Chinese exert much more informal influence on government officials through culture and traditional norms than in the individualistic US, where influence is typically exerted through law or voting. Chinese government officials are often likened to the common people's parents - a concept that may be difficult for many Americans to comprehend, especially if they've been educated on theories like The Social Contract. This notion harkens back to Confucius's Book of Rites, which states, "When a ruler loves what the people love, and hates what the people hate, then he is what is called ‘The Parent of the People.’" [1] This quote encapsulates the ideal level of trust that the Chinese population holds for its government. However, this trust (alongside the respect and authority granted to officials) only persists when the government can deliver results for the people. The saying "当官不为民做主，不如回家卖红薯" or "If one is an official and does not serve the people, it is better to go home and sell sweet potatoes," may sound silly, but it encapsulates the values ingrained in Chinese government officials from a young age. This is not merely a concept that everyone knows, but it is also common knowledge, forming a significant part of the culture. Is this system perfect? No. Can it be applied universally, for example, to the US? Definitely not. However, throughout thousands of years of Chinese history, this system has generally aligned the government with the people's interests from a Chinese value system perspective.
It's been 15 years and we have 50 miles of guideway complete, with 39 more underway; 41 structures complete, and 29 more underway¹.
Some of the completed structures include:
- The Cedar Viaduct, a 3,700-foot-long bridge over State Route 99 in Fresno, which features a signature double arch design².
- The Hanford Viaduct, a 3,300-foot-long bridge over the Kings River and State Route 43 in Kings County, which is the longest structure in Construction Package 2-3²⁴.
- The San Joaquin River Viaduct, a 4,700-foot-long bridge over the San Joaquin River and North Avenue in Fresno County, which includes a pergola structure to allow future trains to cross over the existing BNSF Railway tracks²³.
- The Tuolumne Street Bridge, a two-way bridge that spans the Union Pacific Railroad tracks and future high-speed rail tracks in downtown Fresno²³.
- The Fresno Trench and State Route 180 Passageway, a two-mile-long trench that will carry high-speed trains under several streets in Fresno, including State Route 180²³.
It's nowhere near 5,000, but this whole CAHSR isn't going anywhere... it's going! Slowly but surely. Would I like it to be done before I have grandkids? Absolutely. As the proverb goes though: Blessed Are Those Who Plant Trees Under Whose Shade They Will Never Sit.
There has to be a middle ground. The US did some amazing things without autocracy, such as the public works projects under the New Deal [1] [2] [3], the Marshall Plan [4] for helping to rebuild Europe, the Federal-Aid Highway Act [5] to build 41,000 miles of Interstate highways.
I don't know why things are so difficult now. There's got to be some detailed studies into this problem.
The Federal Highway Act was pretty bad! They plowed interstates through poor (and usually black) neighborhoods to get to the city centers and at least contributed to the urban dysfunction that's been a feature of American cities since.
Then perhaps that’s a point in favour of the current regime which makes large projects difficult to build. If now we have more consultation with stakeholders then it may be less likely for that sort of thing to happen again.
Again, there's got to be a middle ground. It is insanely frustrating that in the 1960s, we were literally able to evict people and destroy their homes in order to plow interstate freeways through downtowns, but in the 2020s it takes years of preparation and meetings to turn a 4-lane road into a 2-lane road with protected bike lanes.
On certain high profile projects, sure. But autocracy typically embeds a lot of corruption at every level of the system which creates a drag in many ways.
A system that prioritizes loyalty and obedience to your superiors more than anything tends to have a lot of waste.
Counter point: Autocracies are actually extremely efficient, but we don't like to admit that. So, we come up with various narratives.
Let's be honest, there is plenty of corruption in democracies and autocracies are pretty damn good at infrastructure. Just not an ideal governing structure for individual freedom and things like property rights which we value higher than efficiency of building things fast.
Autocracies have more variability. There were good kings and bad ones. When the tyrant is smart and genuinely lifelong committed to the good of their people you get the most efficient system. This is the classic argument monarchists have. Problem is in reality the planets alignment rarely happened.
I agree that a good autocrat can be more effective than a democracy, but also think that bad ones are much worse. Plus autocracies are notoriously bad at picking good rulers/successors, so you end up with a lot more poorly run than well run countries.
I also keep hearing this. I keep hearing the “American infrastructure is built to last 50-100 years” (I used to regularly pass a handrail at the Wall Street station that was over a hundred years old, so example of one).
But is China’s really so bad it is going to crumble in half of that?
Which autocracies were/are efficient? Were East Germany, the USSR, Mussolini's Italy, or Nazi Germany efficient - not sure they were. They could get certain things done, but that is very different from being efficient (or even effective) in broader sense.
All fairly small places... the comparison is then maybe Switzerland, some of the Nordics etc. They all seem to be doing much better in building fast than their larger neighbors.
The US also has billionaires and billion-dollar companies deliberately trying to sabotage these sorts of issues. Elon Musk and his 'Boring Company', for example, going around promising a revolution in transportation and then just... ghosting people.[0] "Don't start your public transport infrastructure, we'll build you something objectively worse and far less scalable for a fraction of the price! Uh actually never mind though."
US ISPs also have a history of lobbying to prevent municipal broadband projects, which could provide faster speeds cheaper than large monopolies can. They get the projects blocked by promising to solve the problem themselves, then once the block is in place they just yolo out. Verizon takes massive grants to improve broadband in areas, doesn't do it, and then just... nothing.
Even H&R Block is lobbying to prevent making tax returns easier so that they can continue to be one of the only companies that can file people's taxes without screwing it up (which they do anyway).
China certainly benefits from cutting huge corners, but we also need to remember that every time there's an opportunity to make people's lives better in the US, there's a rich corporation lobbying against it to preserve the profits they're milking out of people's suffering or desperation.
Some people think that Hyperloop was purely intended to sabotage the high-speed rail project by creating the false impression there was a cheaper, easier, option on the horizon.
I am not sure why this gets repeated. Hong Kong (pre. China) and Taiwan gets shit done fast too and they are (were) not an autocratic place to live in (actually they had better environments than the US due to that most people comply without a fuss).
focusing on failures neglects the fact that even those shoddy projects build institutional knowledge. It's funny that there's one place in the US that works the exact same way, the VC/tech industry.
The wins pay for the failures ten times over. And while everyone laughs at ghost cities, with what people learned there you can build the next real city twice as fast. Effectiveness, getting things done, is more important than efficiency. In the EU and NA we now routinely need to bring military, nuclear or civil engineers out of retirement, because we've built so little that we've lost generations of knowledge.
Robert Moses famously got shit done. The problem is, everyone is a special interest to someone. Moses’ favoring automobiles and limited access highways over public transit within NYC limits in retrospect was idiotic.
This would be a valid point if it wasn’t for the fact that you can go to China and ride on a high speed train to see for yourself. Failing that, you can watch one of the many vlogs in which people take HSR to get around the country, or just talk to anyone who’s been to China in the past decade.
Chinese HSR does its own marketing. The material benefit to people around the country, particularly in rural areas, cannot be overstated.
At least California's infrastructure will last the test of time. If China's railways are anything like there global infrastructure then it will probably fall apart in less then 10 years.
I went from San Fransisco to Shenzhen. This is the kind of lies Americans tell themselves to make themselves feel better. Chinese infrastructure is 2-3 decades ahead of US in major cities - the only way you to deny this is to put your head in the sand.
> In California, it's been 15 years and we have 0 miles complete.
California had only 10 permanent employees on its HSR project, everyone else was a contractor. Furthermore, "Interest groups wield CEQA and NEPA like weapons. One study found that 85 percent of CEQA lawsuits were filed by groups with no history of environmental advocacy. The NIMBY attitude of these groups has crippled the ability of California to build anything." [0]
Other governments do not have to take the same approach. The choice is not limited to "be California or be a dictatorship", there are thousands of examples of states taking both a long and short time to do things, regardless of how autocratic they are. Another example from that article, "The Netherlands has strong unions, but the Port of Rotterdam has been automated to an extent that has proven impossible in the U.S. due to union resistance." - if you'd like to know more about how that went, see what the Port of Rotterdam has been doing [1] and what the union ultimately got for their strike action [2] - spoiler alert, they did not stop the increasing pace of automation, as US unions seem to have managed.
> Also built numerous hospitals during pandemic in a couple weeks.
So did the UK government, and then had to close them all as they weren't useful. Haste made waste. "As of 5 May 2020, six of the seven planned hospitals had opened, and by the following month all had been placed on standby. [...] almost all of the increased demand for critical care was met by expanding capacity in existing hospitals. By June, all the temporary hospitals had been placed on standby. Only two had admitted patients" [3]
> Demolished and replaced a bridge in 43 hours
This is normal these days for reasonably small spans [4]
> You just have to quash special interests sometime. Autocracy gets shit done.
You don't have to go to one extreme or another, you can allow your citizens rights and still build rapidly. Certainly, there are tradeoffs, and it depends on the history and traditions of your own country, as to what your citizens will accept. Sometimes regulations get in the way of progress. Sometimes, lack of regulations kill and maim your citizens and destroy their lives, and their childrens' lives. [5] There's no single good ideological approach that works best.
Also landed a rover on Mars in 2021 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhurong_(rover), but I"m not sure how it compares development speed to NASA. Designed for 90 days, lasted 4x that.
As much as the US denigrates China for allegedly trampling on "freedoms," I bet our way of doing speedy big projects in the past has a lot in common with China's current progress. You just have to quash special interests sometime. Autocracy gets shit done.