China has 20 times the land area and 35 times the population of California, and you're comparing apples to oranges comparing a nation-state entity with a sub-nation-state entity that was stymied by conflict with the superior government. And you are comparing actual construction time in China with something else in California (but what, I'm not sure, because 10 years is too short if you are looking at it from public project initial very-partial financing approval with Prop 1A, and too long of you are looking at start of construction in 2015.)

Maybe you could look at other countries with high per-capita rail building projects. Japan has an okay system. The UK is better in that way than the US. Europe is filled with rail. The US is really the only rich country I can think of that doesn't have a workable passenger rail system.

Australia certainly doesn't.

The original article, is on China Governance. I pointed out how well they do infrastructure, related to the article.

> I pointed out how well they do infrastructure, related to the article.

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.

It is certainly in relative decline. This is a matter of fact not opinion.

"Relative decline" is like saying, "my parents are half as tall as they were when I was eight."

How exactly are you measuring this decline?

Please provide these facts.

You could read a number of books on this subject. The China Dream, On China, or Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’ Trap? The Economist is a good magazine, with almost weekly updates on this topic.

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.

Okay, that's not decline, and not all of those figures are facts. Also, you seem obsessed with quantity of infrastructure built, which isn't really a great metric for measuring what you're claiming is happening.

The other poster with the analogy about a child's height is 100% accurate.

Once upon a time, the American consensus was also generally comfortable with destroying neighborhoods wholesale to build freeways and other infrastructure in the name of progress. Now it takes forever or never for fear of triggering a voter uprising. But, these rules came from a place: there are vast swaths of major cities that have been destroyed. Some are not a meaningful loss and others came at the cost of people who lacked the funding and support to effectively pushback. Why Dodger Stadium is in Chavez Ravine is a sad story and is part of the reason why there's a literal school buried under the parking lot.

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 really don't need to destroy neighborhoods to build trains.

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.

And the USSR went from a poor, agrarian society to the first spacefaring nation on Earth in less than 4 decades.

They made it a priority, unlike the US. Whether it should be a priority of the US is separate from whether it's possible to accomplish or not.