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> Imagine how embarrassing and annoying it must be for Chinese people to see the relatively sub-par quality of the end result.

That’s honestly just cope. China has the best rail network in the world by far and there’s really nothing even close to what they’ve accomplished in about 15 years.

In the time the US has been twiddling their thumbs planning and throwing billions at contractors to consider high speed rail and scams like hyper loop, China went from 0 miles of high speed rail to thousands.

There’s a lot of cruft in construction in the US and it’s impossible to deny. I lived near a highway that was being repaired for years. It was ongoing before I moved to that city and apparently only finished after I moved out 5 years later. Thorough environmental checks for building dams, okay. But just build a goddamn road—especially when all you’re doing is fixing what’s there. Quit selling it out to your biggest donor/lowest bidder. Pay someone who delivers results with a record to back it up even if the initial budget looks higher.

Infrastructure is like a pair of boots. Pay a little extra now and you’ll quickly realize why it’s good you didn’t cheap out.

I agree. I feel like a lot of people's perception of China was formed in 1995 and has not been revised since. I hear it all the time online. Their buildings suck and are liable to collapse at any second. Their infrastructure sucks. They can only manufacture junk, and can only do it poorly. They have zero initiative and can only rip off western tech and innovation, etc... It's just not true anymore.

Indeed. The Chinese high-speed rail network transports nearly 2 billion passengers a year. There have been two fatal accidents in its entire history, in 2011 and 2022, with a total of 48 deaths.

That safety record is equivalent to commercial aviation in the US.

Wondered if you are actually Jim Chanos, but he's a China bear isn't he.

> Imagine how embarrassing and annoying it must be for Chinese people to see the relatively sub-par quality of the end result

there's no evidence that infrastructure projects in china, built for 1/3 of the price of what it would cost in the US, is any less quality. In fact, things like highspeed rail is much higher quality, due to leap-frogging of technology!

Ever heard of tofu dreg buildings?

This is anecdotal, but back when I was working in architecture (10ish years ago), I visited the principal of our Chinese sister firm in Beijing, and we walked around and talked about his experience as a native Chinese architect with experience working in the US.

His greatest frustration was the lack of quality in the finished buildings he'd design. As he put it, the designs that Chinese firms were putting out were just as high quality as anything in the rest of the world, but the end result was always worse. It was largely procedural -- in the US, the architect is involved not only during the initial design phases, but throughout the project, and is responsible approving any changes and for certifying that the result matches the intent. In China, that's not the case -- they make a design, bundle it up, and then hand everything over the contractor. The contractor then makes whatever changes they want during the construction process, without any input from the architects. This means materials may get changed, the wrong construction methods may be used, etc, and no-one knows. From a distance, the building will look amazing, but the details will have been skimped on.

not keeping architects in the loop doesn't sound like that big of a problem, if it just affects the quality of the finish as noted. it'd be much more concerning if engineers weren't signing off on construction changes (which can happen here in the US, even with our bloated procedures).

The Architect of Record isn't just signing off on paint colors and finish quality, but on things like the seals around windows, flashing on roofing elements, fireproofing on the structural elements, and many more aspects of the building process. In the US, the vast majority of lawsuits around buildings are due to water infiltration, which is affected by these sorts of issues. The building may not collapse if the architect isn't reviewing it, but the walls and roof might.

That said, I'm not certain that engineers are in a different situation. Judging by videos I've seen of collapsing buildings and other issues, I wouldn't be surprised if structural, electrical, plumbing, and other engineers also hand over their designs in the beginning, and then leave it to the developer / contractor to interpret them and 'value-engineer' as they see fit.

i think my critique is more about the idea the process differences have led to materially different outcomes between chinese and american building projects. i've seen some projects in my neighborhood being made with cheap materials and relatively unskilled labor, that lead to water issues too. i spent 9 months with habitat for humanity building an apartment complex and was surprised at how tolerant the process was to completely inexperienced volunteers showing up for a couple hours and doing all kinds of shoddy work.

when i visited beijing about 10 years ago, i was astonished at how much construction was going on, and i could see that the sheer amount of construction happening would make it seem like there were more issues than here in the US. without more concrete data, i'd be skeptical of that kind of anecdote simply playing into our own biases.

Let me explain a bit more of the procedures, and it may explain why I think this is at least one factor (though I agree that more buildings also means there will be more shoddy buildings in absolute terms, even if the percentage of shoddy buildings stays the same).

In the US architectural process, an architect specifies a particular material (say a roof sealant) that has certain characteristics. During construction, the contractor will look at the material, check its price, and then use their suppliers to see what the best available deal is. The contractor identifies another roof sealant that's half the price. Because they've bid on the project for a fixed price, if they can use that other product and cut their costs, they'll increase their profit margin. So they put in a change request and submit the new product with its data. The architect may review it, see that it is functionally the same as their specified product, and approve it. Or they may look at it and determine that while they're both roof sealants, the specified one has a 10 year lifespan, and the proposed alternate has a 2 year lifespan. They reject it, and the builder uses the specified material.

Without the architect verifying that the material is comparable, the contractor (intentionally or not) will use a lower-quality material that will lessen the quality of the building, because there are no checks in place.

what you're saying makes sense (that this process difference could lead to differences in outcome) but i'd still hesitate against extrapolating to industry-wide conclusions from it. there may be other ways that checks & balanaces are incorporated into the chinese system that we're not seeing or hearing about. and you could as easily flip it around and note how amazing it is that there are so few extra buildings being reported as exhibiting problems despite this missing review process. without survey data, it's hard to know for sure how impactful the review process is (relative to cost in both time and money).

> Forego those "bullshit industrial complex" studies, and there'll be some environmental, safety or cost fuck-up. Outside observers will then get to comment derisively on lack of foresight or planning, so it's really a win-win for us.

I mean, just look at any other developed country like France and look at how they can still build things at a reasonable pace while doing environmental studies. Everyone knows that environmental studies in the US are insane, you just have to read one to be convinced of it.

The way different countries deal with Eminent Domain is a big reason here. Imagine all the subways that have to snuck into existing commercial and residential spaces in a way that doesn't disturb the existing tenants?

https://www.justice.gov/enrd/history-federal-use-eminent-dom...

In China they just move everyone

https://owlcation.com/humanities/Nail-Houses

> Imagine how embarrassing and annoying it must be for Chinese people to see the relatively sub-par quality of the end result.

While this may be true for many shady developer-led real estate projects, it's absolutely not the case for the country's major infrastructure projects like airports, subways, high speed rail, highways, bridges, dams, etc. They rival or surpass anything you will see in the west in scope and quality, and built in a fraction of the time.

Tokyo builds for half the cost and the quality and safety is light years ahead of NYC results.

> . They can build it, but it's not likely to be an apartment I would want to live in, at least long term.

So what? Are you the only person that matters? How about the intern at tech company. How about the guy that cleans the offices.

Should the have to rent a house 2h away and then be forced to buy an old shitty polluting car, wasting 5h of their life and polluting the whole area instead? Is that a better result.

And of course if you do it correct and you don't just build dumb towers, you can pretty easly build nice high density neighborhoods where people wont need a car and you can get density not unlike huge skyscrapers.

>So what? Are you the only person that matters? How about the intern at tech company. How about the guy that cleans the offices.

Yes, they too deserve safe accommodations.

>Should the have to rent a house 2h away and then be forced to buy an old shitty polluting car, wasting 5h of their life and polluting the whole area instead?

The issue in California is not at all that apartment buildings take too long to construct due to pesky safety and building codes. The issue is that NIMBYs prevent them from being constructed at all.

>And of course if you do it correct and you don't just build dumb towers, you can pretty easly build nice high density neighborhoods where people wont need a car and you can get density not unlike huge skyscrapers.

So you agree with me. Didn't sound like it at first, so it's a bit confusing.