Some of the infrastructure has lead to extra economic benefit beyond just the infrastructure stimulus. But other infrastructure might not - and i would call them economic waste (but not political waste).
Have a look at the train projects described here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITvXlax4ZXk
The building of those rail networks is meant to achieve a political purpose, rather than an actual productivity increase. Perhaps their leadership thought it was worth the spend, but this sort of spending would unlikely work in the US imho.
Same goals, same trade offs, same sometimes major wins, sometimes pointless spending.
Chinese new year, more people travel in China than the whole of the USA, homecoming notwithstanding. It's mass transposition, there and back again.
They need trains. I've used them shanghai to Beijing, great service. I wish I'd been able to use the maglev in shanghai
You can make more economical runs per month with trucks than with trains, meaning you get to have less stock on hand as a buffer on both ends.
This has many knock-on efficiencies - fewer resources tied up in goods, lower insurance expense, lower warehousing cost, and above all: a more flexible and responsive supply chain.
building out passenger rail frees up capacity for freight on old rail :)
this is actually a big reason HS2 in bongland is (was) getting built
Only if the high-speed rail gets used by passengers. If it's unaffordable, people won't use it.
> The building of those rail networks is meant to achieve a political
> purpose, rather than an actual productivity increase. Perhaps their leadership thought
> it was worth the spend, but this sort of spending would unlikely work in the US imho.
For natality dont just think today, think 50 years ago when the goal was to reduce it: forced abortion, abandonning your newborn at the nearest wet market (high volume of people) was very common. It's harder to force people to copulate, but I trust our overlords to find a way ahah
The virus however, I m more of the opinion that to fix SARS we decided to import thousands of vietnamese bats to study or such thing and fucked up one way or another. I dont think it was made to kill old people, it was a crazy large scale risky project to prevent the next SARS - the end justifies the means, but this time the means were very costly to foreigners. We dont care yet, or at least we managed to pretend our costs were still low enough not to execute every single person involved, as one should have done if millions of Chinese had died.
Well, let s give her that but then the central gov, surely NOW they can predict 25% of China being contaminated ? How are they preparing ?
China actually solved the excess men problem problem via ethnic cleansing.
Send men to reeducation camps while you import surplus men from another location to eliminate a minority. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_genocide
It’s even more disturbing when you read up on the details, and consider the elderly aren’t yet a problem.
How would the US behave if it had Wahhabist extremists near one of its borders? We've only seen how the US responded to some 6000 miles away in Afghanistan, most of them were brutally executed, not deradicalized or reeducated.
Also, does the US uniformly target Wahhabists ?
Granted, the net may be slightly larger than it needs to be due to China's high population density and the resulting fact that terroristic acts have a high human cost... but it's nowhere near the scale of our (US) net across Afghanistan, Syria, and Pakistan.
The vast majority of muslim communities in China have nothing to do with this kind of extremist ideology, don't commit acts of mass terror, and are not part of these deradicalization programs.
Any source you can provide for this claim?
I've only seen evidence of these programs in certain Western parts of the country, mainly Xinjiang.
According to the Wikipedia description, they sound like US prisons. Prisoners in the US can spend years in solitary confinement (like Kalief Browder from NYC, an unconvicted minor), are forced to work for pennies an hour (same as UNICOR and other such US orgs), and the amount of violent deaths of inmates within the US prison system that generally have little to no followup investigations are alarmingly large from my understanding.
>The United States Department of State called the conditions in prisons "harsh and frequently degrading," and said the conditions in re-education through labor facilities were similar, citing overcrowded living spaces, low-quality food, and poor or absent medical care.Detainees in camps are required to work for little or no pay; while Chinese law requires that prison laborers' workday be limited to 12 hours a day. In 2001, sociologist Dean Rojek estimated that detainees generally worked six days a week, "in total silence." Much of the labor done by re-education through labor detainees is geared towards agriculture or producing goods, many of which are sold internationally, since re-education through labor detainees are not counted as official "prisoners" and therefore not subject to international treaties. They also perform work ranging "from tending vegetables and emptying septic pits to cutting stone blocks and construction work."
>Although drug abusers are ostensibly placed in re-education through labor to be treated for their addictions, some testimonial evidence has suggested that little "meaningful treatment" takes place in at least some of the centers, and that drug abusers often relapse into addiction upon their release from detention.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Re-education_through_labor#Con...
I have no idea why you are comparing them to US prisons. Chinese prisons compare to US prisons, and both are inhumane.
based on projections china's population peaked ~last year. it is a shrinking population from here, and while this will be a huge problem in most of the world (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30735230 discussed recently) but it is happening MUCH sooner in china, and at an unprecedented scale.
it is an existential threat and i am sure their government sees this, and it is scary to think what an "ends justify the means" way of thinking leads to with this problem
"international condemnation" is hardly a meaningful metric. It comes from 1. countries that have done and are doing far worse (slaughter, invasion, fomenting regime change), 2. countries that are sitting there wringing their hands as internal strife mounts over the increasing culture clash, and 3. countries that are lucky enough not to have these problems.
I propose they just leave them alone.
How do you build a reset button? A "mild" pandemic seems like an interesting approach.
Also not saying this was the case at all. However, it is a fact that gain of function research was being conducted, sponsored by the USA.
Oh, and if the modern biotech solution fails, WW3 might do the trick the traditional way.
That's exactly what happened, right?
Anyway, not saying it was or is a master plan. Just saying that if you were hypothetically thinking about a reset button, a pandemic would be a clever approach, and within technological reach.
"The Great Reset" was the official motive of the World Economic Forum. They absolutely do want a reset.
otherwise this way of thinking gets terrifying fast and rapidly descends into conspiracy theory land
example: "need to find a socially-acceptable solution to a demographic time bomb caused by decades of one child policy, while still maintaining ethnic homogeneity ? perform gain-of-function research to develop a vector that disproportionately harms the elderly"
to be absolutely clear, I don't believe this was actually the case in 2019 at all - but as an no-limits "end justifies the means" thought exercise - it is easy to arrive at inhuman dystopian nightmares