China has unique advantages over Europe:

1) it's a quasi-dictatorial regime. Which means, when the government wants something, like a high-speed train track, being built, then it's built, without many ways for affected people to impede/cancel the project or drive up its price (e.g. in Germany train projects are usually delayed or the cost driven up by environmental concerns or noise complaints).

2) Money. China doesn't care about printing money or raising debt to finance the expansion of infrastructure. In Europe, especially in Germany, this is not the case. Printing money is only acceptable to sustain banks. (A policy which I absolutely hate)

3) Local politicians. In Germany, many regional/local politicians want their village connected to the ICE network for their personal fame - one particularly wasteful example is Montabaur, it has regular ICE stops with only 12k inhabitants. Every stop creates a huge delay for trains and kills their average speed. Once again, not so much a problem in China.

You can't compare a trip just by length. The total speed of a train is limited by how many stops it needs to make, and the layout of the actual tracks. Having to do lots of curves to avoid populated areas for example can slow a train down considerably. However if you can go through empty land for hundreds of kilometers in a straight line, you can go full throttle for most of it.

One train on google maps for example has 7 stops between Beijing and Shanghai. Meanwhile Hamburg-Munich has 9 stops on a trip half the length.

It's less than half the speed in Germany. The extra stops do not account for the difference.

At any rate, yes I can compare the absolute times because that's what passengers will do when making choices on how to get from A to B. If the trip in Germany was an hour faster, more people would choose the train.

In the US, it's usually always faster to drive. Traffic congestion can make the train attractive in the northeast.

> It's less than half the speed in Germany. The extra stops do not account for the difference.

You sure about that?

The non-stop train takes 4 hours from beijing to shanghai. now they stop once and it takes 4hr48 (reduced max speed from 330 to 300km/h). At the same distance, DB stops roughly 14 or 15 times. if a stop costs you 10 minutes, you save an additional 2 1/2 hours just by not stopping.

Took the info from wikipedia [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing%E2%80%93Shanghai_High-...

Does every stop cost 48 minutes? I don't have the answer but simply saying it's the number of stops without evidence is not factual.

At least a stop at a major hub will take that time. Basically, you don't only have the time spent stopped at the station, but you also have long period of acceleration and deceleration - an ICE3 takes 3km to stop from full speed in normal conditions according to a quick google search. Also, trains usually have to move extremely slow (40 km/h) in the surrounding area of a station... and the larger the station, the more switches.

average speed is slower due to regular stops. beijing to shanghai seems to stop 5 times. hamburg to munich stops 9 times despite being only 60% of the distance.