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Comment by kochikame | Hacker News Reader

It's easy to do when you can just forcibly move people and don't have to listen to what the locals think before you start laying track

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That’s a great excuse for getting right of ways.

However, that doesn’t explain how they can build 17,000 miles of track and we can’t build 800.

Um, the US government can do that too? I'm not aware of any government that doesn't hold eminent domain powers.

China's method of eminent domain is a bit more... forceful than you might be thinking.

Source: lived in China

Ah, does China go through the courts for every segment, taking months or years (including determining fair value for compensation)?

Dodger Stadium was built by razing a poor but cultural neighborhood and it is now considered to have been unethically done. But it was fast...

> Ah, does China go through the courts for every segment, taking months or years (including determining fair value for compensation)?

Which sounds like a very inefficient court system to me.

I'm not sure I want speedy government takeover of land.

But I want faster trials. If it fails, it should fail fast. If it succeeds, it should succeed fast.

I suppose I cannot argue with that. Many different slow things probably have this same root cause.

The UK government has to go through lengthy rounds of consulting with local citizens, groups, other interested parties in order to build anything like this. Building a new runway at Heathrow took so long because of years and years of consultations and negotiations.

China doesn't have to do that.

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