this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2025
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Mildly Infuriating
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All jokes aside, things like this are why China is beating us. I am absolutely not a fan of the Chinese government, but the simple fact is they get shit done.
It helps that in China you canβt own land. All the land is owned by the government. You only have βuse rightsβ and for a limited time (something like 80 years - I forget the exact number). So when it comes time to build infrastructure the government just tells you to gtfo.
Look to public transit development in Taiwan as an example of how to do it right in a democratic nation. There are still loads of problems but the Taiwanese government canβt just take your land outright. Taipei especially has seen phenomenal growth in its metro development in the last 20 years.
America is no different. Try not paying your land tax.
The only difference is that, in America, someone needs to shout "eminent domain!" first and slip you $500 for your house.
Isn't this post about Canada?
And China has slave labor
I mean so does the United States thanks to the 13th amendment but we don't have anywhere near the same infrastructure to show for it
American slave labor isn't used for anything interesting - it's just letting companies pay less for labor for their own benefit.
And what are the Uighurs making that is so interesting?
China has stronger property laws than the US, look up stuck nail houses. If the US wants your property, they can eminent domain your shit. In China, developers have literally had to swerve highways around property or build shopping centers around that one person who wont sell
Lies. My family had a factory in Wuxi, China. 2 buildings that were dedicated to dormitories. 4 buildings dedicated to manufacturing promotional products.
We were able to lease the land for 50 years with a 50-year option at the end of the term.
Around year 5, the government decided to turn the main dirt road into a proper road. They took back 1/4 of the land. They just used our area for staging.
About a year after the road was made, they decided to expand the road. They took back now 1/2 of the original land and buildings.
Less than a year after the expansion, they turned the 4 lane road i to a highway. They took the entire land back. My family invested millions of dollars in buildings and infrastructure. We got back pennies on the dollar spent on the investment on compensation.
My family never fully recovered financially.
Huh, if the government has that power, why don't they use it for stuck nail houses? I talked to a few people in shenzhen who made significant sums selling land to developers.
Different type of ownership due to your family purchasing the land vs inheriting it? Different provinces? Did they compell them by indirect means such as threatening to revoke a business liscense or asking suppliers to pressure them?
I don't know. Wuxi is significantly smaller than Shenzhen. I think it was around 2 million people at that time.
They didn't give my parents much of an option. When they did finally take the land away, they did offer to relocate us to another location, but at that time, my family was already struggling from the 2nd loss, my parents just ended up closing the business all together.
Wait until you hear about the UK! I own the freehold to my land, but technically it's gramted by the crown, so I could in theory at any moment have my home taken from me.
Wrong, the state owns the land but you can own the house, and not just for your 70y BS period.
There are plenty of articles like of instances where homeowners don't want to sell for infrastructure like this: https://twistedsifter.com/2012/11/china-builds-highway-around-house/
I know for a fact here in EU or the US they will indeed " just tells you to gtfo"
BTW, in China a high 90% of people OWN their house and aren't rentslaves.
So there's that China bad man.
It's hard to overstate how much safer and more ethical it is to use eminent domain and fairly compensate someone monetarily for their property than to leave their house in the middle of a highway
I'm sure the developers offered "fair compensation", you need to demand lot before fucking up the highway design is more economical than meeting their offer.
In the US, the government provides compensation, not developers, and they pay fair market value as determined by local appraisal districts.
The main difference here seems to be that the US can compell property owners to accept what they determine is a fair market rate, but another poster informed me that in some cases the chinese can compell people to sell too.
That's besides the point wether you think it's better or not, it should be the OWNER's decision as is the case in China.
And not what this rustydomino is pulling out of his ass.
No it's not besides the point, it's in direct response to your point. Leaving a house in the middle of the highway is a better outcome for no one
The discussion was about having rights of ownership and on the decision, not anyone's opinion what is better.
So you're completely besides the point even if you can't admit this obvious fact.
No just any shit, shit that helps everyday people living in their country.
I'm just thinking of the major cities in my U.S. state where the public transit map, before and after, looks like Chengdu in 2010. So as unfortunate as the circumstances are in Toronto, they can be even worse.
One of the reasons they can build their future so quickly is because they were left in a unique position after WW2 to effectively destroy their past.
And they have slave labor. Oops, I guess that's something that shouldn't be said in a post pandering China
not a downvote either. guess you didn't say the magic word.
Uyghurs
The US hates China, hates muslims but pretend to care about those poor Chinese muslims.
I wonder why?
I've been to urumqi, literally anyone can go there.
Theres no slave labor, its normal industrial farms. Unless youre suggesting the guys driving the combine harvesters or running the factories are secretly enslaved.
all the big countries have slave labour by any other name, they all fucking suck
I'm curious, tell me more about this (actual question, not being sarcastic)
China was invaded by Japan before WW2. Look up the Rape of Nanking if you want specifics. Once WW2 ended China had a civil war. The CCP managed to win and Mao Zedong ascended to power. He led the Cultural Revolution which basically eliminated the old ways of China to pave the way, over the bodies of millions of people, for modern China.
I cant find statistics on total occupancy rates, but I never saw a high speed train in China that wasnt mostly full, and they mosty sell out days beforehand, so Im pretty sure that's just someone making shit up. As far as domestic debt due to infrastructure spending, apply your model to Japan.
Turns our neoliberalism was always full of shit, a jobs program that produces useful infrastructure is infinitely better than leaving people unemployed or subsidizing walmart's wages.
I think people forget that many of the highways in The Westβ’ were created as part of glorified jobs programs too.
These projects run like utter shit now in places where work is tendered out to corporations now of course, because they're being driven by private bodies whose sole motivation is profit, not the creation of useful infrastructure. In my own country HS2 is a beautiful example of this.
Do you have any clues why privatization was so much more destructive in the UK than Japan? The JNR breakup increased ticket prices, decreased service, and made the system overall much more inefficient (Nagoya has subway, rail, elevated rail, bus, elevated bus, ferry, gondola, run by 16 different companies, tokyo has vital subway lines run by different companies, so you pay nearly the cost of a 24 hour pass for using this one transfer), but regulation and infinite loans stemmed the bleeding. You still have rail service to the boonies, even if its an unmanned platform or a guy who shows up twice a day to check shinkansen tickets. The destruction to the UK rail system seems much more permanent.
Honestly I don't know enough about the way that it's run to give a correct answer!
I mean even pre-privatisation the rail service was being reduced (Beeching's cuts etc.) so there's clearly a cultural element at a government level, but the actual running of the rail firms is pretty opaque; there's a lot of subcontracting, and the profitability is high, with reinvestment in the railway services not being proportional to that. I suspect that the culture around rinsing public services for private gain isn't quite so dominant in Japan, but again, I couldn't comment on that really.
We also have relatively old infrastructure, comparably narrow gauge railways that we would struggle to update because the country was built up around it, but this might be a bit of an old-fashioned take. I'm sure some transport historians could set me right!
I think that person's logic goes like, "government run" = "artificially propped up" = "doesn't count as real growth".
It's the final form of capitalist indoctrination to only be able to reason about other systems through its lens.
It's almost as if infrastructure is there to facilitate growth and economy and not to turn a profit.
Do the same math for roads: How many percent of the roads in your country (or any other country) turn a profit?
Do the same with water works, sewage and so on. All these things have benefits far greater than immediate profit.
You need roads so that people can get to work and to places where they can spend money and so that goods can be shipped. And all of these things generate taxes and economic benefit, which in turn finance, among other things, road building.
It would be entirely stupid to think that every piece of infrastructure needs to finance itself and turn a profit, while completely forgetting the actual purpose and benefit of the infrastructure.
Ok, let's assume you read the article. Quiz question: who owns the China State Railway Group Co Ltd? (Hint: it's in the name)
Also, I guess you didn't just invent the "stated goal" of the China State Railway Group, so it should be quite easy for you to find said stated goal in their actual stated goals (http://wap.china-railway.com.cn/english/about/aboutUs/201904/t20190408_92993.html), correct?
If you had bothered to actually read the article and if you had bothered to actually research anything at all about the topic at hand, we probably wouldn't have the discussion.
The reality is the high speed rail it China is not solvent and is operating at a tremendous loss. That's just reality. The question is if that loss serves a larger benefit to Chinese society. It's a gamble either way.
Again, the same applies to e.g. the road network in the USA. Infrastructure is there to facilitate economic growth and freedom. Without roads it's much harder to transport goods, get people to work, give people the mobility to move to jobs that are farther away while still being able to live closer to where they want and so on and so on.
And the same applies to public transport as well.
Only supreme idiots would argue that roads should turn a profit. And public transport is much cheaper at transporting people than roads.
It's !mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world that people don't understand what infrastructure is and what it's there for.
Overproduction of commodities is certainly a problem for capitalists. But the workers get to enjoy a lower cost of living. Like I would much prefer we built ghost cities (Chengdu was derided as a ghost city at one point) than have a decades long housing crisis with no signs of improving unless we deport millions of people.