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[–] 86 points 1 year ago (4 children)

All jokes aside, things like this are why China is beating us. I am absolutely not a fan of the Chinese government, but the simple fact is they get shit done.

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  • [–] 45 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    It helps that in China you can’t own land. All the land is owned by the government. You only have β€œuse rights” and for a limited time (something like 80 years - I forget the exact number). So when it comes time to build infrastructure the government just tells you to gtfo.

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  • [–] 14 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    China has stronger property laws than the US, look up stuck nail houses. If the US wants your property, they can eminent domain your shit. In China, developers have literally had to swerve highways around property or build shopping centers around that one person who wont sell

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Lies. My family had a factory in Wuxi, China. 2 buildings that were dedicated to dormitories. 4 buildings dedicated to manufacturing promotional products.

    We were able to lease the land for 50 years with a 50-year option at the end of the term.

    Around year 5, the government decided to turn the main dirt road into a proper road. They took back 1/4 of the land. They just used our area for staging.

    About a year after the road was made, they decided to expand the road. They took back now 1/2 of the original land and buildings.

    Less than a year after the expansion, they turned the 4 lane road i to a highway. They took the entire land back. My family invested millions of dollars in buildings and infrastructure. We got back pennies on the dollar spent on the investment on compensation.

    My family never fully recovered financially.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 child)

    Huh, if the government has that power, why don't they use it for stuck nail houses? I talked to a few people in shenzhen who made significant sums selling land to developers.

    Different type of ownership due to your family purchasing the land vs inheriting it? Different provinces? Did they compell them by indirect means such as threatening to revoke a business liscense or asking suppliers to pressure them?

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  • I don't know. Wuxi is significantly smaller than Shenzhen. I think it was around 2 million people at that time.

    They didn't give my parents much of an option. When they did finally take the land away, they did offer to relocate us to another location, but at that time, my family was already struggling from the 2nd loss, my parents just ended up closing the business all together.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)
  • [–] 18 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I mean so does the United States thanks to the 13th amendment but we don't have anywhere near the same infrastructure to show for it

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Wrong, the state owns the land but you can own the house, and not just for your 70y BS period.

    There are plenty of articles like of instances where homeowners don't want to sell for infrastructure like this: https://twistedsifter.com/2012/11/china-builds-highway-around-house/

    I know for a fact here in EU or the US they will indeed " just tells you to gtfo"

    BTW, in China a high 90% of people OWN their house and aren't rentslaves.
    So there's that China bad man.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    It's hard to overstate how much safer and more ethical it is to use eminent domain and fairly compensate someone monetarily for their property than to leave their house in the middle of a highway

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (1 child)

    I'm sure the developers offered "fair compensation", you need to demand lot before fucking up the highway design is more economical than meeting their offer.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    In the US, the government provides compensation, not developers, and they pay fair market value as determined by local appraisal districts.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    The main difference here seems to be that the US can compell property owners to accept what they determine is a fair market rate, but another poster informed me that in some cases the chinese can compell people to sell too.

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  • [–] 20 points 1 year ago

    No just any shit, shit that helps everyday people living in their country.

    I'm just thinking of the major cities in my U.S. state where the public transit map, before and after, looks like Chengdu in 2010. So as unfortunate as the circumstances are in Toronto, they can be even worse.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    One of the reasons they can build their future so quickly is because they were left in a unique position after WW2 to effectively destroy their past.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago (7 children)

    And they have slave labor. Oops, I guess that's something that shouldn't be said in a post pandering China

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago*

    I've been to urumqi, literally anyone can go there.

    Theres no slave labor, its normal industrial farms. Unless youre suggesting the guys driving the combine harvesters or running the factories are secretly enslaved.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    not a downvote either. guess you didn't say the magic word.

    Uyghurs

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago

    If you're USian - you have vastly more domestic slaves (I think you call them prisoners in for-profit prisons) than Uyghur population. Maybe you should do something about it.

    If you're not USian, no rebuttal.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I'm curious, tell me more about this (actual question, not being sarcastic)

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago

    China was invaded by Japan before WW2. Look up the Rape of Nanking if you want specifics. Once WW2 ended China had a civil war. The CCP managed to win and Mao Zedong ascended to power. He led the Cultural Revolution which basically eliminated the old ways of China to pave the way, over the bodies of millions of people, for modern China.

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  • [+] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)
  • [–] 23 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

    I cant find statistics on total occupancy rates, but I never saw a high speed train in China that wasnt mostly full, and they mosty sell out days beforehand, so Im pretty sure that's just someone making shit up. As far as domestic debt due to infrastructure spending, apply your model to Japan.

    Turns our neoliberalism was always full of shit, a jobs program that produces useful infrastructure is infinitely better than leaving people unemployed or subsidizing walmart's wages.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I think people forget that many of the highways in The Westβ„’ were created as part of glorified jobs programs too.

    These projects run like utter shit now in places where work is tendered out to corporations now of course, because they're being driven by private bodies whose sole motivation is profit, not the creation of useful infrastructure. In my own country HS2 is a beautiful example of this.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 child)

    Do you have any clues why privatization was so much more destructive in the UK than Japan? The JNR breakup increased ticket prices, decreased service, and made the system overall much more inefficient (Nagoya has subway, rail, elevated rail, bus, elevated bus, ferry, gondola, run by 16 different companies, tokyo has vital subway lines run by different companies, so you pay nearly the cost of a 24 hour pass for using this one transfer), but regulation and infinite loans stemmed the bleeding. You still have rail service to the boonies, even if its an unmanned platform or a guy who shows up twice a day to check shinkansen tickets. The destruction to the UK rail system seems much more permanent.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    Honestly I don't know enough about the way that it's run to give a correct answer!

    I mean even pre-privatisation the rail service was being reduced (Beeching's cuts etc.) so there's clearly a cultural element at a government level, but the actual running of the rail firms is pretty opaque; there's a lot of subcontracting, and the profitability is high, with reinvestment in the railway services not being proportional to that. I suspect that the culture around rinsing public services for private gain isn't quite so dominant in Japan, but again, I couldn't comment on that really.

    We also have relatively old infrastructure, comparably narrow gauge railways that we would struggle to update because the country was built up around it, but this might be a bit of an old-fashioned take. I'm sure some transport historians could set me right!

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  • [+] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 child)
  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    It's almost as if infrastructure is there to facilitate growth and economy and not to turn a profit.

    Do the same math for roads: How many percent of the roads in your country (or any other country) turn a profit?

    Do the same with water works, sewage and so on. All these things have benefits far greater than immediate profit.

    You need roads so that people can get to work and to places where they can spend money and so that goods can be shipped. And all of these things generate taxes and economic benefit, which in turn finance, among other things, road building.

    It would be entirely stupid to think that every piece of infrastructure needs to finance itself and turn a profit, while completely forgetting the actual purpose and benefit of the infrastructure.

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