this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2024
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Great example of another tech that is slowly bankrupting China because of it‘s overly excessive but poor implementation. One trillion dollars of debt and rising for a network that is barely used in most parts.
Did you just make that up? According to wikipedia (it cites a chinese-language source I can't read), average occupancy was increasing until 2016, where the statistics end.
But we can infer later occupancy from other statistics:
Passenger trips per year increase every year, with a drop in 2020, but it went back up to 3.68 billion in 2023, 1.6x what it was in 2019 and 3x what it was when occupancy had increased to 72%
There's issues, such as that it tends not to run through city centers, but lack of occupancy doesn't seem like one. In any case, cheap intercity transit is a public good that benefits the whole country. Being able to travel 800 miles in 4 hours for 40 bucks is incredibly convenient.
What next, are you going to claim China is full of ghost cities because building enough housing that everyone can afford it is bad actually?
None of what you said is even related to the one trillion (and rising) debt in any way. Why don't you stay focused on the argument but instead dump random facts into the discussion?
By the way you literally just have to type "china highspeed rail debt" in any search engine of your choice and get bombarded with facts about it. Why didn't you even try?
Who are they in debt to? Mostly their own state-controlled Industries. So when China is 1 trillion in debt to their productive capabilities they are failing, but when the US is 35 trillion in debt to international finance capital (via the federal reserve) that's a healthy economy.