The West and China have different goals.
China's goal is to grow fast at all costs.
To use your street example, the West makes a great effort to listen to the views of all the people affected by the project, including people who live near and work near the project. The West will also do a study to make sure the environmental impact is acceptable. The West will also do a survey to make sure nothing of any historical or archaeological importance isn't affected. The West will put the project out to multiple bidders and make sure that minority-owned companies are represented in the project. Depending on the project, there may also be other studies and considerations.
China just does the project, and if it's done wrong or harms anyone, too bad. Get out of the way.
Different systems. Different philosophies.
One isn't better because it's "fast."
There is a middle ground where projects are ethically and considerately done in a reasonable amount of time, at a reasonable cost. This doesn't seem to be happening in either SF or China, but I can imagine it's happening in many places around the world.
The middle ground is also the middle between US and China, something like Germany.
I do meet Americans who moved to Europe but they also have to contend with various dissatisfaction. A dysfunctional and Kafka-esque bureaucracy is one of them, and the high tax + mediocre income + unfriendly laws on share grants, as well as a way too "socialist" system which doesn't recognize individual contribution much, is another huge factor that have led many people to reconsider their choices. If they have some particular reason, e.g. chronic medical condition, have a family and want more work-life balance etc., then sure, Europe might work better for them. But for a young single person Europe is actually nowhere that good at all.
I think eventually people just have to understand that there is no paradise on earth. Every place has its set of unique strengths and weaknesses and characteristics formed by their culture and history that are not replaceable. Romanticizing an "exotic" place too much will invariably lead to deviation from the reality and disillusionment in the end. Similarly, demonizing a place, be it China or the US, will also be very one-sided and biased. Only clear-headed objectivity will benefit you the most.
In my city, the reason why this happens is because municipal officials are corrupt, incompetent, and not held accountable. It has nothing to do with what you said.
Feel free to invite me. But it's not necessary. I've been on China's high speed rail system.
Its a huge accomplishment that our society isn't capable of producing.
I've also been on the one in Japan, Korea, Italy, France, Germany, and Belgium.
And then you projected that all of western civilization is in decline because the US hasn't prioritized high speed rail. Among other things, this completely ignores the countries within the "West" that have high speed rail as well.
That's what people are taking issue with, not that you pointed out that China has high speed rail.
We've been surpassed in PPP, Global Trade, Industrial Output etc. China's steel production is 1 billion tons a year, the US 80 million tons. They poured as much concrete in the last 10 years as we poured in the 20th century. In just a few years we will be surpassed by GDP and witin 25 years China's GDP will be double the United States.
China's rise is not disputed.
The other poster with the analogy about a child's height is 100% accurate.
China doesn't care. You do what you're told. If you complain too much, you disappear; if the project has an atrocious safety record, they are not reported and no such records exist (or blame a low-level official); if an entire neighborhood was destroyed without compensation, shut up and deal with it. You can get what you want, just how many bodies are you willing to bury to get it?
You need to destroy neighborhoods to built road infrastructure, though. This is because "I/O operations" on high-speed roads with massive bandwidth à-la-USA requires ungodly amounts of space.
Here is the infrastructure needed for high-speed rail : https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/26/FXD1-J00..., plus one train station per city. The switches can be built outside.
Here is the infrastructure needed for traditional highways: https://i0.wp.com/usa.streetsblog.org/wp-content/uploads/sit...
If the infrastructure that was built was not horribly inefficient due to an almost ideological opposition to mass transit, there wouldn't have been neighbourhoods destroyed wholesale, and the precedent leading to the gargantuan opposition we see right now would simply not be present.
You clearly misunderstand what the First Amendment is about. It's a restraint on government, not a restraint on everyone else.
Around 1865 we reached the conclusion that it is the duty of the Government to protect some people from having their freedom taken away by some other people. Since then the Constitution started imposing restraints not only on the ability of the Government to curtail your freedom, but also the ability of your fellow citizens to do so. And this is a good thing.
But lately we started regressing. I'm talking about the cancel culture.
Do you think that if one day a person were to be physically tarred and feathered by a crowd of puritans because of some perceived transgression, that is ok? But then if the tarring and feathering is in the digital world, and much more permanent (nothing is forgotten on the internet), is that ok?
The end result is that people learn there are some things you can say, some things you can't, and some things you must say.
I guess Hong Kong's problem is they just haven't experienced China's rail system yet. /s
Its actually not that hard and Chinese content platforms are a breath of fresh air
Me thinks you would be surprised at what works
The state there takes a paternal approach, like a literal parent, or teacher or school principle (or unit commander, or HR department). It isn’t that unrelatable, we all grew up in similar restrictions. When everyone agrees that is what the role of the state is, nobody is trying to be a freedom fighter to alter that
That's sort of like saying Chinese politics is a breath of fresh air because you don't have to worry about picking a side and hearing the various parties arguing with each other.
they have a heavily neutered internet and it is a pleasant experience
its a walled garden, at the country level, do you want a sticker because of your awareness of Beijing?
there is simply a life beyond imagining it as oppressive all the time, when the reality is that you just hang out in communities in your niche and you dont have to worry about it being randomly politicized. A large part of the mindshare in the west is trying to figure out how to do that, checking out the other internet is probably good for your mental health
If you consider car-centric society barbaric, you've never experience barbarism, or understand what the word even means. Hyperbole is not helpful.
Being factual and a little more subtle goes a long way.
I live in an urban area and enjoy not having to drive long distances (or at all) to run errands, but I don't see them as an extenstential threat to humanity as many posters here apparently do.
I still haven't figured it out.
Barbaric is a fun word, but one that would be easy to twist the other way. In one system you get to be crammed into a little train car with dozens of other people, in the other system you have some privacy and personal space and a seat...
Again, pros and cons all over the place... the US doesn't have good trains because it built other systems instead due to the point in time in which many of its cities developed, and they are "good enough" that most people would see little benefit from ripping it all up to replace it with trains.
It's worth noting too that "they make the trains run on time" is literally a cliche about certain types of government at this point, not some unique accomplishment.
If you have enough money for both options, then it's not surprising that the option which costs at least an order of magnitude more provides a slightly more comfortable seat.
The Chinese state can produce projects, but how valuable they are is often up for question; the Urumqi high speed line doesn't even make enough money to pay for the electricity to run the trains. https://www.ft.com/content/ca28f58a-955d-11e8-b747-fb1e803ee...
America's problem isn't with building new roads, it's with maintaining them.
Building new is easy. Let's see how China fares in 50 years when it has to maintain an aging infrastructure.
China executes at scale, but does not necessarily execute good things at scale.
/s
Before I moved to San Francisco, I lived in Beijing for 9 years, the last 3 of those in an apartment in the Sanlitun area of Beijing, within 3 mins walk of a Bentley dealership, Lotus dealership, a craft brewery etc.
When we moved in, a school down the street had construction going on, and was surrounded with scaffolding and then some signage or whatever. The sidewalk was completely blocked off, making it difficult for pedestrians to pass.
Over a year later, they finally finished construction and the updated building was revealed. They'd extended the building to take over the sidewalk completely. You'd think that, if this was intended, then they'd build a new sidewalk and narrow the car lanes a bit. But, no, pedestrians have to walk into the road to go around this school.
This construction was both slow and bad. I admit it's not typical: the nearby Holiday Inn went from zero to operational within a few months.
How you can conclude that the US is in decline because a street repair in a single city takes longer than it probably should is beyond me.
I would argue the opposite is usually true. Setting aside China, authoritarian regimes are usually NOT known for being efficient or well-run.
I am not American, but I came back from my visits to China with a similar feeling to the grandparent comment. The West tends to stick their fingers in their ears and yell "Authoritarian regime, I can't hear you!" at the mere suggestion that China does certain things better and there may be something to learn there.
well run != efficient
Authoritarian regimes are highly efficient at accomplishing what the people in charge want to do, long term consequences be damned. Frequently, the people in charge are primarily focused on retaining or even acquiring more power and wealth, which is generally not well aligned with what most people would consider a well run nation.
> I am not American, but I came back from my visits to China with a similar feeling to the grandparent comment. The West tends to stick their fingers in their ears and yell "Authoritarian regime, I can't hear you!" at the mere suggestion that China does certain things better and there may be something to learn there.
The issue here is that there isn't an agreement on what "better" means. Social harmony at the expense of individual freedoms isn't better. Technological advancement that is based on IP theft isn't better. Infrastructure improvement that causes long term harm to the global environment isn't better.
Are you saying there are no lessons the West can learn from China's infrastructure projects without resorting to authoritarianism, IP theft, or environmental harm? That there is no way to pick apart and separate some positive learnings from the negatives?
Are you saying THIS is the best we can do as a Western democracy?
https://torontolife.com/city/transportation/tortured-history...
To me, this kind of paralysis on infrastructure projects is not "better" by any definition you use. It's not an intentional tradeoff between infrastructure and environmental protection, or between public development and property rights. It's just indecision, waste, and stagnation.
Every time a comparison to China's infrastructure comes up, the knee jerk reaction is to point out that it's an authoritarian regime so of course they can force through any infrastructure project they want. Which is fair enough, but it drowns out any discussion asking "Hey, CAN we do any better in the West than we are doing right now? Is what we have good enough?"
Not at all. Every nation can always learn from others, or at least be motivated by the accomplishments of others to improve internally.
> Are you saying THIS is the best we can do as a Western democracy?
Maybe? Again, it depends on what your definition of "best" is. If not enough people in Toronto think it's important enough to have a robust public transit system, then it doesn't happen. I'm very confident Toronto has the resources required to complete an ambitious project if desired.
> To me, this kind of paralysis on infrastructure projects is not "better" by any definition you use. It's not an intentional tradeoff between infrastructure and environmental protection, or between public development and property rights. It's just indecision, waste, and stagnation.
If the project isn't a good use of resources, indecision and inaction is the better outcome.
> Every time a comparison to China's infrastructure comes up, the knee jerk reaction is to point out that it's an authoritarian regime so of course they can force through any infrastructure project they want. Which is fair enough, but it drowns out any discussion asking "Hey, CAN we do any better in the West than we are doing right now? Is what we have good enough?"
Unlike in China, these discussions already happen regularly, and the key difference between the status quo in China and the West is the decision making process, so that's where the conversation is focused.
I wish I shared your confidence, but this suggests otherwise:
https://toronto.citynews.ca/2018/09/26/transit-the-number-1-...
I find it difficult to accept that this is the best outcome by any metric I can think of.
>Unlike in China, these discussions already happen regularly, and the key difference between the status quo in China and the West is the decision making process, so that's where the conversation is focused.
Is it? The conversation is focused on how China is authoritarian, not on how the Western (I really should say North American) decision-making process often leads to poor outcomes and stagnation when it comes to public projects.
This IS getting pretty far off-topic from the actual article, so I'll stop here.
That's a pretty recent poll (on the timeline you provided in the earlier article), so maybe it's a sign that a more comprehensive transit system will be built soon.
> I find it difficult to accept that this is the best outcome by any metric I can think of.
It's definitely not optimal if you support public transit. The western model is more concerned with preventing tyranny than efficiency or optimal outcomes, for better or worse. This could very easily be one of the times where "worse" is the case. I'd still prefer it over an authoritarian system.
> Is it? The conversation is focused on how China is authoritarian, not on how the Western (I really should say North American) decision-making process often leads to poor outcomes and stagnation when it comes to public projects.
It seems to have expanded quite a bit beyond that (not between you and I, just generally), which seems pretty common for these types of topics.
> This IS getting pretty far off-topic from the actual article, so I'll stop here.
Fair enough, thanks for the discussion.
I heard that Italian fascists made the trains run on time, too.
Here is the Chinese high speed rail built in the last decade, it is not propaganda, it's literally something you can buy a ticket for and travel on at 350 km/h right now. I truly worry for Americans incapable of seeing what is happening in the rest of the world.
Yeah, its nice. Authoritarian regimes usually have some nice prestige projects to show, which is really nice if you are a foreigner they are trying to impress, or a local that is in favor with the regime. Not so much if you are out-of-favor, whether because you opposed the particular approach they took for the prestige project or for some unrelated reason.
But, as much as I like HSR and wish the US would do it, emulating China -- whose ability to do it isn't a mystery needing study, but well-understood -- isn't a cost worth paying for it.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bf/High_Spe...
I'm not exactly pro-prison, but so far I haven't heard any alternatives that I believe would work as a solution to violent crime. I'm open to suggestions. It is certainly the case that the U.S. has too many laws.
LOL. China is able to move very fast, but the idea that it's a well-oiled machine functioning in perfect harmony is a ridiculous fiction.
Construction projects in China cut every corner possible. When something fails catastrophically, they'll throw a low-level official under the bus. At every level, there is total abdication of responsibility. The whole system incentivizes this.
See: "The Chabuduo Mindset" https://www.chinaexpatsociety.com/culture/the-chabuduo-minds...
> The west is slow and we are in decline. China is growing fast.
Yes, and this should terrify everyone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XopSDJq6w8E
> At every level, there is total abdication of responsibility. The whole system incentivizes this.
Exactly like the USSR and Chernobyl.
Construction quality satisfies fast, cheap, good like everywhere else. As someone who worked adjacent to construction industry in both China and North America, the difference is China has the "fast" option available, whereas NA is mostly cheap + good, and frequently just cheap. It's less about being well managed, but having all the options and managing appropriately. Tons of capital projects in China and related prestige developments aging well. The latter surprisingly so considering how many retardley ambitious (almost unworkable) starchitect designs were built. Sure, lot's of uninhabited commodity projects falling into disrepair but abandoned bubble subdivisions don't fair much better. Difference is China builds more, so more catastrophic failures. Question is, it worth the cost? Deng wanted poor China to develop fast. So China ChaBuDuo's as deliberate development strategy and manages accordingly.
>When something fails catastrophically, they'll throw a low-level official under the bus. At every level, there is total abdication of responsibility. The whole system incentivizes this.
Chinese Aviation and HSR safety? Public accident -> regulate + execute those responsible = about safest aviation and HSR in the world. Surmise the same with food and vaccination safety, but effects of those scandal stake longer to determine. Regardless, incentives seem to align with state interests to me. On building stock specifically, there's no interest high quality commodity construction. Why would there be? Current 60% urbanization rate, goal 70%, realistically 80-90%. That's 140-420M people who needs apartments. Queue current 65M empty condos and ghost city memes.
Obviously it's not perfect, but it has more tools to address some serious problems that's stumping the west, especially beyond political cycle timescales. Curious if west would try deleveraging or could successfully regulate FAANG. Too many things west can't do, but should. Also too many things CCP can do and shouldn't.
The city has a lot of difficult problems to solve, but it sure does do some horribly wrong things with the simpler problems.
It’s not like the city budget has doubled in the last 10 years.
Maybe a change of scenery is in order for you. I can't imaging living in a hellscape like San Fran. I'm in a veritable paradise as far as I can tell. There are problems, but we are working on them, and we generally have the freedom to do so on our own terms without nanny government holding our hand.
This goes both ways. I’m from Dallas and live in Los Angeles. Both cities have their own share of problems (and their own great qualities) — and yet both are much more likely to quickly dismiss the other as lost causes than take a deep look at their own issues.
It’s fine to have a preference, obviously, but don’t let your preference cloud your judgement: many would say the exact same thing about rural Arkansas — and for many, it probably wouldn’t be a paradise, based on any number of politics, orientations, race, socioeconomic status, or even just where your friends and family are! — but that doesn’t mean it isn’t for you.
Almost all American infrastructure is either a vanity project, a jobs project, or a political quid pro quo operation to an ally to get some other thing done.
The problem is that once you get really used to this mode of operating, you kind of forget that there are sometimes things that really do matter. I think America has a picture of the things she already knows of: crucial highway collapses? gotta fix now! But the ability to recognize new crises goes away without novel crises.
So America can't build ventilators in an emergency, can't train nurses in an emergency, can't do anything new. But I think America can deal with the old things just fine if she wants to.
Any civil engineers here that can explain why “simply” might not apply?
I have watched some sewer modifications[1] here in Christchurch (earthquake damage, Insituform product), and it looked incredibly complicated and I didn’t see how they reconnected each home’s connection to the main.
A typical metaphor for software engineering is rebuilding a plane while it is running. What is an appropriate metaphor when you are fixing old pipes that carry human excrement and the system mostly keeps working while it’s being done...
Why? I mean, its not news that top-down authoritarianism is very good at doing whatever the top decides needs done without considering anyone else's concerns or interests, this isn't something that needs study.
And there are no shortages of places practicing that to decamp to if that is your preference for style of government.
When it's keeping the "other" out it's gross, but when they are shutting down pointless vanity projects like a sculpture park no one wants maybe that's democracy as advertised.
An example in Atlanta was a politician friends with those of the same party works in another county but serves on advisement boards for the city as a sole employee of those boards netting him hundreds of thousands a year. It only came to light because he screwed up the taxes. This is wide spread, as in nation wide. All those committees and such are mostly there to reward each other, family, and friends.
China just eliminated having any competing political power. They have factions within but all serve the same top.
Example of gaming the system https://www.ajc.com/politics/fulton-da-howard-fined-by-state...
A dire contrast with the west which since the industrial revolution grew up so fast by respecting human rights, the environment, other nations, international law. The lack of self-awareness of people like you genuinely scares me. You vote people who has the power to erase the planet with nukes and you consider yourselves superior to other races/nations. Truly hair-rising stuff.
A lot of the "environment, safety, human rights" stuffs originate from official propaganda by western state apparatus which want to contain China/feel threatened by China's progress, so they want to reassure themselves of their superiority and contain every country in their designated place in the food chain with a certain narrative, just like how China does official propaganda to paint the west in a bad light on issues such as COVID containment and affirm its own superiority. But people who unquestioningly gobble up such propaganda are definitely aplenty out there (I would guess the desire to feel superior/justified against an unknown threat/"others" could even be part of human nature, which however is what education and rational thinking are exactly supposed to allow us do better at).
Aren't people supposed to do better knowing how much people in the past screwed up? Isn't that what progress is all about? Learning from your mistakes?
Because it's not terrifying. China has lifted 800 million people out of poverty. What's terrifying is nations like India and continents like Africa haven't followed and developed. Instead there are nearly 1 billion indians and africans without electricity, plumbing, etc.
> Aren't people supposed to do better knowing how much people in the past screwed up?
Well, china didn't invade australia, canada, US, etc and wipe out the people and steal their land and destroy other people's environment to enrich themselves. So maybe they learned something. The hypocritical hubris is not going to do us any good. Over the long term, it's gonna be our undoing.
Or maybe, there is no other option. In order to make an omelette you gotta break some eggs. And in order to develop, you have to suffer through some environmental degradation.
Not only are the chinese entitled to it, so are the indians, africans, middle easterners, etc. Are they all supposed to languish in poverty while they wait for some magic development process to appear.
While a privileged virtue signaler can comfortable whine about the environment, the millions of people living in poverty don't have the luxury.
If one is serious, it isn't hard to take a look at how the industrial revolution happened over the past hundreds of years to understand how the West reached its current status in the first place, going through exactly similar stages. Development is a hard, long-winding process, and one doesn't magically get there overnight. There was an interesting study that looked at the corruption level in the US in the 1800s and found it to be 8 times more than the corruption level of 1990s/2000s China. When countries like Norway were poor before they discovered oil, it was not like they were exactly the model paradise of equality, green economy and "human rights" at all, while China now has the ambition to lead the green economy by 2050.
As you said, one could simply look at a third-world African country. Are people there objectively suffering from more human rights abuses, more poverty, more environmental pollution, than people in China? Is the supposed parliamentary democracy working there?
The West talks all the time about how they're supposed to help those countries develop by implanting all its system, while eventually all it does is to make it easy for the multinational western capitalists to reap the rewards. Nobody helps anybody else develop at its own expense for no reason. This is just how politics naturally works. China took advantage of the manufacturing boom to get out of poverty, which of course benefited the West a lot along the way as well, but China always also had a clear determination to grow out of such a "world factory" role, which the West clearly didn't foresee nor wanted to see. Thus the tension nowadays.
China is pushing a lot of policies in Africa nowadays and of course it's also largely out of China's own geopolitical needs, but maybe some of its infrastructure projects actually benefit the population more than some previous foreign investments, or maybe some of them don't. The point is, in the end you have to look at what actually benefits the common folks the most, instead of all the hypocritical gesturing and varnishing talks on the surface.
Well, no, exactly like the West that did many of the same things as China at a similar stages in their development, with similar results (there's a difference between the hybrid of state capitalism and corporatism with central elites in practical control of "democratic centralism" in modern China and peak private capitalism with capitalist control of notionally democratic institutions in the early industrial West, but there are also lots of similarities), and very much like what lots of Western countries did later under slightly different systems than peak private capitalism that are also similar to China's current system (e.g., fascist corporatism)
Which is exactly why "how China can do what they do" isn't at all a mystery or place the West needs to go to learn lessons. Its not that the West has never done the kind of things that China has done, but that its been there and moved on. Certainly not completely, and certainly with deep remaining problems. But a few pretty prestige projects for the elites and those willing to knuckle under for them aren't worth the cost of reversing progress on those fronts.
When I visited China, China feels like America. I'd argue China has embraced capitalism and we are moving in the opposite direction.
The CCP has embraced capitalism when it's convenient for them. What they haven't embraced is a consistent rule of law or anything approaching a democratic government, which are the basis of every other functioning, stable nation on Earth.
Also, I think it's likely that Trump has made leaders in the the West realize how much they rely on each other, and ties will be quickly re-strengthened under Biden.
However, before we go asking the commies how to run governments, there are perhaps some other, less authoritarian, countries who also get things done that we might look at?
There’s an interesting story with Deng Xiaoping and Lee Kwan Yew behind this.
China is not 'well managed', rather, they can 'move quickly and build things of questionable quality' in some places, not others.
The ability to build some material things very quickly is definitely useful and creates some utility, but it's not tantamount to 'well managed'.
SF has busses, trains and a subway that run, it's far from perfect, but what they suffer from is 'too much money'.
[1] https://www.worldometers.info/gdp/gdp-per-capita/#:~:text=Gr....
And who of course would object when doing so would ding your "social credit" score and restrict your right to do things like travel, or access the internet.
I agree that single party states run very well, after all when you don't have to worry about pesky freedoms or rights it's amazing what you can accomplish.
Next up President Xi Jinping has a 99% approval rating. How does China produce such beloved politicians?
Americans know very well that their public sector fails to execute projects on time and on budget. They just don’t think the tradeoffs to convert to the Chinese system are worth it, nor are the benefits of the Chinese system exclusive to that system.
It was written to agree with the parent, not disagree. Yes, that does break from the normal comment thread cadence of agreement on odd layers and disagreement on even layers. ;)
In San Francisco for example, we are undertaking a street repair of 19th street that will take an estimated 2 years. My best guess is that it will actually take a decade to complete, like the van ness project. This is simply a modification of a sewer system and a street re-pavement - nothing new. China could complete this in a week.
The west is slow and we are in decline. China is growing fast.