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Comment by BurningFrog | Hacker News Reader

In China the purpose of infrastructure projects is to get infrastructure.

In the US the purpose of infrastructure projects is to enrich everyone associated with the project.

That simply isn’t true at all. There are plenty of unused or underused highways and bridges in China that made a few red families lots of money.

It’s fascinating to me that some people think corruption in China is lower than the USA. Not even the Chinese would make such a claim.

It's absolutely corrupt, but in a way that still gets projects done. Many, many projects, on a scale we can't even conceive of here. It's hard to believe our corruption is worse, but Occam's Razor says otherwise.

I did not at all claim there is no corruption. But look at your own quote:

> There are plenty of [...] highways and bridges in China

I think we agree that the infrastructure does get built!

Much of it with the main purpose of enriching people.

China, especially a few decades ago, was so poor that eminent domain was a complete non-issue. Combined with a fairly authoritarian government system, building a train line faced basically no resistance.

In the US, it's almost the opposite. The places where public transit is most needed are the most highly valuable, densely populated areas, where eminent domain is a nightmare. In the US, all of our highly populated areas are already urban. In the past, that was certainly not the case in China, and to an extent, still so today.

One of China's more ambitious solutions to this was newly founded, planned metropolises where no major city had previously stood.

Aka the infamous ghost cities?

Which would you rather have? A city that stands empty, ready for people to move in, or a city so full and restricted that people camp on the streets?

China has both, actually, so you don’t really have to choose. Those cities won’t fill if they are faraway from jobs, migrants go where they can make money even if they have to sleep under a ring road bridge.

China has no shortage of people. These cities will fill up.

Maybe it's my Bay Area PTSD, but if too much housing is the worst problem in your society, I envy you and want to subscribe to your newsletter!

I’ve been to a few that haven’t filled up in 10 years, eg kangbashi is going nowhere unless coal makes a big comeback (unlikely).

I’ll match your Bay Area PTSD with my Beijing PTSD. The crazy thing is that even in Beijing there are lots of empty apartments (bought by speculators for flipping only who don’t want to renovate them so they can be rented out).

I always want to defer my theoretical speculative punditry to people's real experience, so I'll agree you're probably right.

Many of them, yes. Keep in mind, too, though that there are places like Shenzen. It's grown an order of magnitude in 40 years and was designated as a specific enterprise zone. It was a market town. Now it's an electronics manufacturing powerhouse.

For every Shenzhen there are ten Kangbashies and a couple of Tianjin financial districts.

> * China, especially a few decades ago, was so poor that eminent domain was a complete non-issue*

This is a really weird framing of a system without any private property where people who got in the way of the government where slaughtered by the millions.

Yeah, it's improved immensely since 1989, but still. Let's not forget history. The killers are still alive.

Ideas like this which are politically charged but plausible explanations also square with the GAO's failure to make a satisfactory report. Perhaps certain interests tugged on people which tugged on others and ended up watering down the GAO's report. If it weren't true, at the very least the report could dispell/falsify the notion that widespread corruption were to blame. But instead, we get neither.

No China infrastructure project is laden with just different kind of political strings. In US the system has to impress up on voters, unions, donors etc. In China the hogs at the trough are just different.

You say that but they get things done while we build nice mansions for contractors instead.

Don't kid yourself, there are people getting rich on those china projects.

They're also getting some really nice infrastructure in the process. I can't say the same for America these days.

Nothing wrong with getting rich from providing important infrastructure to society.

Lots of people get rich in China and the railways, roads, and buildings get built. In the US people just take the money and don't build anything in a lot of corrupt states. In some states there is less obvious corruption and things get built more quickly. New York City and State are simply unusually corrupt by US standards and corrupt by global first world standards.

And yet Robert Moses managed to ram home some of the most ambitious public works projects the world has ever seen in New York, precisely because he was somewhat corrupt and could disregard process and opinion.

I think self enrichment on public projects is a thing anywhere public projects happen. The difference is that in the US it is often the only goal due to the politics involved with creating budgets which often result in bartering silly little projects to make this or that representative vote along. The problem with this is that these small uncoordinated efforts serve no bigger strategy. It's literally nothing more than a photo opportunity for some politician to look good just in time for his next election.

China seems really good at coming up with long term strategies and then executing them over the course of a few decades. The US used to have that ability but seems to have lost that. The highways and railways of the US were built in a very different era where such things were needed and people got tasked with getting things done on an epic scale. A bit like China is today maybe.

China deployed massive amounts of infrastructure over the past few decades. That was intentional and probably made a lot of people very wealthy as a side effect of getting that job done. Maybe not all of that is as effective and there definitely is somewhat of a debt bubble around this.

The fix in the US and Europe is to make public spending on these things sexy again and to stop relying on contractors that are in it for funneling as much public funds to their own pockets as they possibly can. Big government haters have been good at scaling down government, which used to get things done inefficiently but at least got them done and is now simply not getting things done at all. The market did not step in to do it better and when it did get involved, it optimized for profit and enrichment instead of results. Probably by most objective standards this is less efficient from a tax dollar point of view as it is a lot more expensive and the results are decidedly underwhelming.

Here in Berlin, the new airport is a good example of inept politicians making some contractors and themselves very rich while not getting the job done for nearly a decade past its original opening date in 2012, before it became clear that there was not going to be an opening two weeks before the planned date. Especially, when you consider that it is supposed to replace two existing airports that were built with a minimum of fuss and cost in the cold war era when airports simply got built when politicians decided they wanted one. E.g. Tegel, one of the current airports got constructed in 90 days in 1948 to support the Berlin airlift and still serves much of the traffic in Berlin (way more than it was ever intended to be able to handle). Planning for the new airport started in 1996 and it's still unclear if they are actually opening as planned in 2021.

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