Fuck the CCP
Cries in HS2
OK, the CCP built a high-speed rail network with plenty of shortcuts causing multiple accidents on their shit system. No thanks. If a country wants to build a high-speed rail network, which the USA should fucking do, buy it from the Japanese, French or Germans.
You don’t buy anything but baked goods from the French
Careful if you buy it from us in France, make sure you don’t buy trains that are too large to fit in the train stations
They still are saddled with profit motives for some of their lines and the “if they build it they will come” strategy isn’t working out too great for them. Better than others of course.
Has any of this actually been built? Everybody’s got “plans.”
Elon Musk “plans” to build colonies on Mars.
Yes, this is a map of what was completed in 2018. China isn’t the US, they don’t give billions of dollars of public funds to grifters like Elon Musk, they actually build things.
As an example, China used more concrete for building projects from the years 2011-2013, than the US used in the entire 20th century.
China has built entire ghost cities, bridges, subways and malls using Tofu Dreg construction. So yes, that is technically correct. China does indeed “build things.”
Actually planning for the future if something the US can’t even fathom doing. Remember this fearmongering article from the daily mail about a “ghost” subway station in Chongqing?
Here it is now:
Western countries look at China building a city where no people are, and see waste, when in reality its just the PRC properly planning and building cities, anticipating housing and infrastructure, before they need them.
Meanwhile the US doesn’t do anything beforehand and cities become a sprawling suburb, car-centered wasteland. They let private capital seeking short-term profits build their cities.
My general opinion on China over the past few years have evolved to “OK they aren’t perfect, but at least they seem to be trying, instead of actively making everything worse.”
I’ve lived inside the western propagandasphere most of my life, and I’m always surprised at how obscenely xenophobic and dishonest it is. To the point of being an inversion of reality.
I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I held on to many of these “china bad” media narratives and was reluctant to let go of them when confronted with reality. I can say now how wrong I was and irresponsible it was for me to perpetuate that bullshit. I won’t excuse my old attitudes, but I do recognize that I didn’t invent them either; I just sort of absorbed them.
The closer I look at China, the more my opinion improves. Especially with regard to geopolitics, the Belt and Road Initiative, BRICS, renewable energy and infrastructure building. It’s a success story of the process of socialism; they are effectively constraining and directing capital to improve material conditions for the working class. Planning society to meet the needs of its populations works. Building peaceful and productive partnerships around the world works. Of course nothing is perfect and any rapidly industrialized society comes with growing pains, esp given China’s own historical context, but I’ve come to regard China as close to as a model society for our point in time in many ways. And yep… I’ve also been guilty of having stupid ultra-left “iT’S NoT ReaL ComMuNiSm” takes too. I honestly wish I had been raised with a Marxist education in my early life so I could have found a sane way to understand the world much sooner.
As the empire collapses, I think it’s becoming clear to more people that the western media narrative is a bandage over the rotting wound of capitalism; ignoring its own decay and falsely demanding that we believe everywhere else must be somehow worse.
Yes, this is the built status.
Parenti quote
If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard.
By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative.
If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology.
If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom.
A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them.
If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained.
What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.
No no no. This is Whataboutism. It doesn’t count.
Amazing what a nation can do with slave labor
Do you know which country built its railways by actual Chinese slave labour? USA.
For some reason it is always projection, even in such a completely unlikely case as this one.
Then the states should have a huge high speed rail system, since we have the largest available slave population in the world.
Do you think the PRC has high speed rail because of “slave labor?” What on Earth are you talking about?
Love trains
A huge W for public transport. I assume the PRC already owning the land is significantly decreasing bureaucratic cost / time, allowing for such fast advances.
In sharp contrast the US (and some European countries) keep running after tech bro “innovations” like the hyperloop rather than sticking to actually working systems. Most of them will never see a real purpose because they were never realisable in the first place or will be slimmed down to a point where conventional public transport would have been the better option. And tbh, most of them are really just bait to keep those countries in a state of “looking for alternatives” whilst their current infrastructure is rotting away. And with especially the US being a nation centered around individual transport the vision for public transport is imo clearly lacking.
Europe in general isn’t hit by that as much, seeing the benefits of current public transport solutions (at least nowadays… the 90’ and 00’ were different thanks to neoliberalism and making short term profits instead of doing long term investments), but it is hindered by the clusterfuck of nations / different railway standards. The EU is trying to manage some of it (with ETCS / ERTMS) as well as the new coupling standard (DAC) and track gauges slowly but steadily going towards 1435mm but there are still a lot of things to do such as a transition towards a standard current or even more important: unified train registration (atm a train/carriage needs to be registered for each country separately which leads to unnecessary train switches at border crossings). For example Italy requires carriages to have a fire extinguishing system whilst some other EU countries don’t or some mountainous countries require specific braking tests. Having unified safety standards would make things a lot easier.
But at the upside at least some European railway companies do have a vision. For example, the ÖBB (Austrian federal railways) plans to have high speed rail connecting the main cities as well as European alpine corridors like the Brenner, Koralm and Semmering, regional trains for distances covering abt 200km and are reachable in abt 2 to 3 hours and (sub-) urban rail for metropolitan areas. In bigger cities, they want to provide bike sharing at the stations whilst they want to make car sharing available for countryside stations to help cover the last few kilometres through the mountains/woods/fields, where busses only go on a daily basis if you are lucky and the bus driver doesn’t skip your stop and take a shortcut because they believe nobody will be waiting there anyways and they might reach said vision in the next upcoming years and likely less than a decade.
So TL;DR the PRC is profiting off of their property law, their ability to centralize standards and them going the (at the moment) optimum way instead of hoping for innovation from tech bros with fancy power point presentations and zero knowledge of physics, Europe is doing alright but is a bit of a decentralised mess and the US is getting a bit distracted by “innovations” and their mantra of individual transport.
(My experience in the area mainly comes from working at a state-owned railway company and being interested in the matter in general. If there is anything to add or if I have gotten something wrong, feel free to comment.) ^-^
The hyperloop really encapsulates how car brained and isolated Americans are - even public transit should be individuals in a car alone one at a time.
I got a bunch of the new Toyota ad during my podcast today and the entire thing was a guy going on about how much he fucking loves traffic and rush hour now so he can hang out in his Toyota even longer.
FML.
Spain and France especially seem to be doing a good job building high speed rail:
It’s just a pity that renfe’s new high speed trains built by Talgo seem to be a shaky and noisy experience as highlighted here:
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For context, the total length of high speed rail in the world is 59,000km. So China, which makes up 17% of the world’s population contains 2/3 of the world’s high speed rail.
The closest comparison would be Europe, which has about the same land mass and half the population of China has around 11,000km of big speed rail.
It’d be hard to quantify, but I’m sure some statistics person could compare transportation methods, that includes speed, distance, energy usage, population, capacity, and probably a few more, per capita.
You could isolate it to a country’s top X biggest cities, and how traveling between them compares in all those metrics.
Since Lemmy.world friends can’t see the Lemmygrad and Hexbear comments, it’s really weird to see the pro-commie takes not get downvoted and debated to oblivion
Where are the pro-communist takes? I just see a bunch of pro-authoritarian takes lapping up PRC koolaid.
pro-authoritarian takes lapping up PRC koolaid
Koolaid is when you spend 16 years building trains.
Truth and Liberty is when your roads are falling apart faster than you can resurface them.
The PRC is Socialist and led by a Communist party, so the commenters are supporting the PRC.
Ah yes, the communist country that is held up by hyper-capitalist activity, with a rapidly growing billionaire class.
Socialism with Chinese Characteristics is Marxism-Leninism applied to the PRC’s present productive forces and material conditions. They have not reached Communism, but they are firmly on their way to full socialization of the economy. The only way you could think they have abandoned Communism as a goal is if you have never read Marx, Engels, or Lenin, and therefore have never studied Historical Materialism.
The reason it’s painfully obvious that you haven’t studied Historical Materialism is because you clearly believe Communism is something that develops through decree, not degree, that the goal of Communism is to immediately socialize all production. This is absurd, and Utopian. Marx believed Socialism to come after Capitalism because Capitalism turns itself into a status ripe for socialism as markets coalesce into few monopolist syndicates, ripe for central planning. If the productive forces aren’t ready, then Communism can’t be achieved without struggles.
In Question 17 of The Principles of Communism, Engels makes this clear:
Will it be possible for private property to be abolished at one stroke?
No, no more than existing forces of production can at one stroke be multiplied to the extent necessary for the creation of a communal society.
In all probability, the proletarian revolution will transform existing society gradually and will be able to abolish private property only when the means of production are available in sufficient quantity.
What happened in China, is that Mao tried to jump to Communism before the productive forces had naturally socialized themselves, which led to unstable growth and recessions. Deng stepped in and created a Socialist Market Economy by luring in foreign Capital, which both smoothed economic growth and eliminated recessions. This was not an abandonment of Communism, but a return to Marxism from Ultraleft Maoism.
Today, China has over 50% of the economy in the public sector. About a 10th of the economy is in the cooperative sector, and the rest is private. The majority of the economy is centrally planned and publicly owned! Do you call the US Socialist because of the Post Office? Absurd.
Moreover, the private sector is centrally planned in a birdcage model, Capital runs by the CPC’s rules. As the markets give way to said monopolist syndicates, the CPC increases control and ownership, folding them into the public sector. This is how Marx envisioned Communism to be established in the first place! Via a DotP, and by degree, not decree! The role of the DotP is to wrest Capital as it socializes and centrally plan it, not to establish Communism through fiat.
Read Socialism Developed China, Not Capitalism, and read Marx himself before you act like an authority without even understanding Historical Materialism.
No I have read it. I agree that China was in a bad state because they didn’t do things at a tolerable pace, and instead used a more shock doctrine. The economy sucked, people were starving, being more authoritarian wasn’t doing the trick, so they caved to pressure from the US to open capitalist markets, and allow for a capitalist class. Now China has grown its capitalist market, and its billionaire class, and its surveillance, authoritarian state, and the capitalist markets are every bit as important as the government. This is more reminiscent of fascism, in red uniform.
“Do you call the US is socialist because of the post office” is kinda the opposite of the argument i am making isn’t it? I am saying that the structure is so integrated, and dependent on, its capitalists, that it looks more like the integrated corporatism of a fascist regime. So I am kinda inferring the opposite of this, am I not? That something as small as the US owning the post office would never qualify as socialism? Wouldn’t that be a, lame, yet more apt attack on your argument?
They are even pushing their borders. The big blockade keeping them from going for it is the NATO superstructure that gives the US/NATO physical military reach anywhere in the world. And yes, I heard their “the enemy is on our boarders, we are just defending ourselves”, but that is what NATO and the US say about their growing moves to take the sea of Japan, and the island nations of SEA, or, at least, the waters surrounding them. That is literally one of the first things from every empire that started taking foreign territory. Hell the belt and road initiative is just economic imperialism in its first steps.
It is difficult for me to imagine what “personal liberty” is enjoyed by an unemployed person, who goes about hungry, and cannot find employment.
Real liberty can exist only where exploitation has been abolished, where there is no oppression of some by others, where there is no unemployment and poverty, where a man is not haunted by the fear of being tomorrow deprived of work, of home and of bread. Only in such a society is real, and not paper, personal and every other liberty possible.
That’s very true but Lemmy will call that being lib
No I have read it. I agree that China was in a bad state because they didn’t do things at a tolerable pace, and instead used a more shock doctrine. The economy sucked, people were starving, being more authoritarian wasn’t doing the trick, so they caved to pressure from the US to open capitalist markets, and allow for a capitalist class. Now China has grown its capitalist market, and its billionaire class, and its surveillance, authoritarian state, and the capitalist markets are every bit as important as the government. This is more reminiscent of fascism, in red uniform.
This is asinine. Mao and the Gang of Four weren’t trying to “authoritarian” their way to a stable economy. They had good growth, but socialization was done prematurely. Instead, Deng invited foreign Capital while retaining Special Economic Zones and CPC supremacy over the Market. This isn’t fascism no matter how you slice it, since fascism is Capitalism in decay and serves the bourgeoisie. China has a Socialist Market Economy.
“Do you call the US is socialist because of the post office” is kinda the opposite of the argument i am making isn’t it? I am saying that the structure is so integrated, and dependent on, its capitalists, that it looks more like the integrated corporatism of a fascist regime. So I am kinda inferring the opposite of this, am I not? That something as small as the US owning the post office would never qualify as socialism? Wouldn’t that be a, lame, yet more apt attack on your argument?
Your argument would only make sense if you supported any of it with facts and supporting evidence. The Private Sector is shrinking as a ratio of the entire economy of the PRC, the bourgoeisie is subservient to the CPC. This is not “reminiscent of fascism,” because the proletariat retains control, not the bourgeoisie. The majority of the economy is publicly owned and planned, pretending that that makes it a Capitalist economy is woefully ignorant.
They are even pushing their borders. The big blockade keeping them from going for it is the NATO superstructure that gives the US/NATO physical military reach anywhere in the world. And yes, I heard their “the enemy is on our boarders, we are just defending ourselves”, but that is what NATO and the US say about their growing moves to take the sea of Japan, and the island nations of SEA, or, at least, the waters surrounding them. That is literally one of the first things from every empire that started taking foreign territory. Hell the belt and road initiative is just economic imperialism in its first steps.
You acknowledge that NATO and the US are antagonizing the PRC and yet claim it’s their fault? You call the Belt and Road Initiative “Imperialism” in its first steps without supporting that? You call the PRC fascist because it has a Socialist Market Economy subservient to a Dictatorship of the Proletariat? You have no idea what fascism even is, all of your analysis is surface level and it’s clear that you’re acting as a western-chauvanist. Good things are bad and fascist because it’s Chinese people doing it? Utter chauvanism.
Read Marx, Engels, and Lenin before you start mouthing off about how you know better than Communist parties in AES states do.
Most of China, and for the matter, the USSRs economic, and supply woes were due to incompetence. People who did not understand how things, like farming, worked, forced farmers to do things that the farm laborers, you know, the proletariat knew wouldn’t work. They absolutely destroyed a huge portion of their agricultural base with inept initiatives, informed by a lot of pseudoscience, primarily Lysenkoism. No, I am not saying the USSR intentionally starved Ukraine, or that Mao weaponized starvation. They implemented Lysenkoism, by force (an authoritarian action), it was pseudoscience, it, and a litany other stupid moves, they implemented by, again, force (you know, authoritarianism), ended up causing multiple great famines, killing tens of millions. The reason such pseudoscience was able to take control, in the way that it did, was because of the practices of party favoritism/elitism. Lysenko was an ardent communist, not some reactionary scientist telling us things we don’t want to hear. Their centrally planned economy was also fed full of bullshit, in a similar manner. This lead to extreme inefficiency, stagnation, and widespread poverty. It was not until the implementation of the open door policy, created in cooperation with foreign interests, primarily the US, in 1978 that this began to change. Once they opened regional centers, to operate industry under a capitalist market system, they saw almost immediate improvement in many facets of their economy. Though it was rocky at first, the long term picture was one of growth. After just over a decade of development, China’s economy really began to boom.
This has led to all the problems capitalism has wrought upon other countries. Their wealth disparity is enormous, and growing. The billionaire class is having more, and more influence over CCP decision making (billionaires currently occupy just over 100 seats on the CCP parliament, seeing rather consistent growth) despite purging the occasional “upity” CEO. (see Bao Fan, Jack Ma, Rhen, etc). This had led to flight of wealth, and a growing resurgence of brain drain. This assertion of control, through violence, is actually proving to be one of the, suspected (by Chinese economy experts) to be a major factor in recent slowing in GDP. Though it was impossible to maintain that growth, so how much of it is natural, and how much is not, is debated, though widely agreed it is has had a major impact. This has lead to strife within the CCP. There is no unified consensus on how exactly how this will play out, or whether or not Xi’s policy will be moved away from, as it affects the wealth of the CCP members, its self. Also, the extreme wealth disparity, culture of their market, and numerous other factors, with great consternation, of the public, over the slowing of growth, is leading to less, and less, coherence within the citizens. There is whole a lot going on, like literally 100s of thousands of pages of data and studies on the subject out there. Too much for me to concern myself with here, though I will leave some links below.
The borders thing. Yeah, the “west” established its self first, so it is, of course, reacting to the growing strength of China, and its influence over the region. China is also reacting to these established boarders, trade routes, etc. with their own expansion in mind. I do not see this as China simply bullying everyone around them, nor do I see it simply as China being a victim of being surrounded to previously established nations, and their operations. Both parties are pushing their strength where they can. If NATOs military infrastructure recedes from its SEA, and east asian allies’ areas, China will continue to push its borders on those places. Looking at the history of literally every major power in history, I do not believe, for one second, China will voluntarily hold back from imperial expansionism, if it comes to a situation where it can. The USSR took everything around it the moment it could, in the aftermath of WW2, and I expect nothing less from any other nation who is given the opportunity. Their expansionism can very well be seen with the BRI. It is wrought with corruption, graft, extortionate lending practices, etc. While some nations, primarily in Africa, still prefer working with the BRI, to similar economic cooperatives with the EU, and NAFTA countries, there is a growing disdain for it too. A lot of places are really starting to see that it is just China’s version of western economic control, as China gets control over more, and more, of their wealth.
https://rhg.com/research/no-quick-fixes-chinas-long-term-consumption-growth/
https://www.jri.co.jp/english/periodical/rim/1999/RIMe199904threereforms/
https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/RL33534.html
https://www.jri.co.jp/english/periodical/rim/1999/RIMe199904threereforms/
https://ceias.eu/understanding-the-implications-of-chinas-economic-slowdown/
https://www.ncuscr.org/podcast/chinas-slowing-economy/
https://now.tufts.edu/2023/11/20/why-chinas-economy-slowing-down
https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/epdf/10.1142/S1013251123400052
https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/chinas-21st-century-aspirational-empire
https://macmillan.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Victor Louzon.pdf
https://carnegieendowment.org/posts/2020/05/china-has-two-paths-to-global-domination?lang=en
It’s also kind of funny, Lemmy.world gets to pretend their takes have the majority of support when they shut out dissent.
If you really like to see clowns that think they are 100% you might like to see r/austrian_economics
I value sanity too much
Reasonable
Fixed
What’s different?
Taiwan isn’t part of China
Can you name the countries that recognize Taiwan?
Can you name a reason why colonization is a good thing?
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Do you consider southern states in the US occupied or a part of the US?
You didn’t answer my question, why should I answer yours?
Your questions doesn’t make sense, unless you consider US southern states in the US to be occupied as well
Ah, there it is. I was focused on the wrong thing
More jpeg
Fuck cars, but this is not the way. Overbuilt and underfunded it has a shaky future.
high speed train in china is fuck planes, not fuck cars.
imagine what happens when a plane ticket is half or a third of the price, and you land down town at subway station…
now the subway… that’s fuck cars.
if you think that the high speed rail in china is a net negative, i have a ghost city to sell you.
This is absolutely the way. Are you anti-rail, or anti-PRC?
Caring about the long-term viability of the train system is not anti-rail you need a break from the internet.
Ah, so you’re just anti-PRC, got it.
How so?
“Overbuilt and underfunded” is unsupported and meaningless, this is showing that high speed rail is good and possible, but without actually offering any counterpoints it’s just nonsense anti-PRC drivel.
Lmao with all due respect you’re a re7ard
How is public transit overbuilt? It’s also well funded: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_China
Ableism isn’t good, comrade.
Bloody hell, Dessalines posted
Hot take: Japan invented the bullet train, but China perfected it.
If perfected means they put it even where probably there wasn’t a need for it, then yes. HSR is fantastic for connecting big cities, but it’s also very expensive and sometimes China has prioritized HSR rather than regular rail, even though there wasn’t a strict need for very fast expensive trains. Sometimes slower, more frequent and cheaper low speed rail can make more sense.
It’s not bad per se, but it’s money that could be used for better purposes.
Counterpoint: HSR is far more energy efficient than air travel, which would otherwise be the preferred option because regular trains are just not fast enough for country as big as China. Even when the electricity is generated from coal, the simple physics of not needing to literally defy gravity significantly reduces the carbon footprint of the trip.
@HiddenLayer555 @dessalines There isn’t much lacking in the Japanese network.
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Now they are tunneling below the Japanese Alps to build a maglev connecting Tokyo to Osaka, the Tokaido Shinkansen is at capacity running 17 trains an hour during rush hours.
Yeah and you get a free massage from all the shaking.
Classic Chineseium tofu dreg. 🥱
