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Funny that you use the high speed rail network as an example. While China built an impressive amount of it in a short time, they also built way too much of it. The routes between smaller cities and some of the routes between larger ones lose ridiculous amounts of money and most of the network is just getting to the age where the first major maintenance is becoming necessary.

The network as a whole is deep in the red and it accumulated $ 1T of debt, alot of which was underwritten by the local governments. Because the fares are so high, most chinese cannot afford the high speed trains and they instead use the slower service. In essence local taxpayers are subsidizing the high speed journeys of the rich.

Contrast this with Germany, where sure buildout is slow and >250km/h sections are rare, but all train operators combined only have something like 5B € in debt and the high speed sections are about break-even.

>built too much ... debt

Infra net benefit goes beyond basic balance sheet math, no serious analysis suggest US high way system or 1T infrastructure bill to get US infra unfucked a massive waste. The purpose of infra is to generate more economic activity than it consumes. Analysis of net benefit of PRC HSR a few years ago was ~400B, or ROI of ~7%. It's a solid investment. The other context is PRC pop concentration of 1.3B east of Heihe–Tengchong Line, denser the closer to coast, where military aviation gets priority due to proximity of neighbours makes mass civilian air travel not feasible - HSR is replacing capacity for air travel not slow rail. Imagine if all US aviation, military and commercial are biased towards one coast to the point where capacity to move bodies becomes functionally saturated. Hence the joke that once PRC reunites with TW, they can afford to push military aviation further out from coast and then civilian aviation (notorious for delays in mainland) wouldn't be such a shitshow. Also why it's not useful to contrast to Germany since connecting requirements for a long trip (i.e. 600km Berlin-Munich) in a small country is different from long trip (i.e. 1500km Beijing-Shanghai) in a large country. Ultimately, PRC HSR is impressive reflection of CCP state capacity because it's not just about laying down fuckload of tracks, but being able to politically realize enormous projects for the right reasons.

Also for reference this entire idiotic PRC HSR boondoggle narrative was popularized by Indian nationalists after PRC nationalists made fun of them for not being able to build HSR, then amplified by customary western PRC bad bubbles.

> There are even benefits to authoritarianism - for instance Chinese infrastructure is in many cases far better than US infrastructure and built far more efficiently. The US has about 49.9 miles of high-speed rail while China built 25,000 miles in the last few years. They've even got maglev trains. We've got the diesel Caltrain (for now! electrification is finally happening). [edit] (And soon the Bakersfield-Merced Express - stopping at every cow paddock along the way). The PRC built a bridge from Hong Kong to Macau, 34mi long, and built islands along the way to support it.

I don't see how that can be explained by authoritarianism. All you've arguably shown is that today China is more efficient at building out infrastructure than the US.

The US built infrastructure efficiently too back when it was a developing country. From 1940-1980 the US built an incredible amount of infrastructure.

It’s must more efficient to build where there was nothing before than build where there is already something. Even China faced this issue with Three Gorges which took then decades just to get started.

I can accept that one point doesn't make a line.

However, I think it's also worth mentioning since you call out the 1940-1980 period, that a lot of that infrastructure was built thanks to, to my knowledge, the federal Declaration of Taking Act, 1931.

It was put on the books to enable faster confiscation of land for public use by the government. Unlike state eminent domain laws, the federal law gives the government the right to take the land first, tell you to vacate immediately, and have the courts set a price later. The government acquired land area under the declaration of taking act roughly the size of South Carolina (20 million acres). [1]

Meaningful infrastructure projects require setting aside individual rights for the collective good, and in the last few decades the US lost its taste for doing so. Now even building a basic over-land high-speed train is a morass of litigation and whining which balloons costs, reduces state capacity and leads to ridiculous compromises.

In my opinion it's not a question of whether theres "something there" or not - there's nothing in the Central Valley or along either the I-5 or the CA-99 corridor of any particular note. Building along it efficiently requires some authoritarian land-taking that the US has long since lost its taste for, despite having the capacity to carry out.

Many today would consider collecting 20M acres of land, telling people to get off, and eventually paying them out some amount set by the courts to be an act of authoritarian government imposition on private land incompatible with a western liberal democracy. In my opinion it's silly that one dude's cow paddock and one dude's fear it might make some toads sad can hold up high-speed rail between the two of the biggest economic powerhouses in the world.

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

Japan arguably resembles a liberal western country though.

japan and korea use a proxy like a feudal-era lord systems. Hence, the chaebols and keiretsu controlling the bulk of the economy