China completes green belt around Taklamakan Desert | Hacker News Reader

China completes green belt around Taklamakan Desert

sand-boarding.com

193 pointsuprootdev148 comments

It took 46 years to create the 1,900 mile, ~3060 km green belt around the 130,350 square miles (337,600 km2) desert. The linked article doesn't say anything about negatives, but the positives seem to be very beneficial for the area.

I really wish other major powers would commit to similar projects. In my opinion, communities need larger goals to strive towards, to provide a sense of continued belonging and reinvestment for the future.

> other major powers would commit to similar projects

There is African Union's "Great Green Wall (for the Sahara and the Sahel)" initiative, the 8000x15km wall of trees to stop desertification of the Sahel from the Sahara.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Green_Wall_(Africa)

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/africa-great-green-wall-...

This a good video to show some of what they are doing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbBdIG--b58

Note that if you follow the maps links at the bottom of the video, you'll see that the areas covered are tiny compared to the area necessary. The promotional videos which are presented with government sponsorship and supervision look great, but - is this project actually seriously progressing across the continent?

I've sometimes wondered whether arid parts of the American Southwest could, through the right kind of permaculture interventions, support more biological carbon sequestration, more plant life, drive development of richer soil etc. But I suspect if you said "we're gonna use this big section of BLM land to incrementally try to keep water in the landscape, and introduce a sequence of plant species that can increase carbon storage and soil cover" the immediate American political response would be "government overreach!" on one side and "what about threatened species X that thrives in the sparse desert?" on the other. And if you did get such a project approved, some elaborate supply chain would arise to provide plant seedlings at 10x the normal price and a consulting firm would be brought in for k million for a plan to administer the project, and the ratio of humans getting paid for the project to acres worked would be inexplicably high.

I agree that theres no hope of such a project ever happening in the USA unless it’s on private land, and even then someone is going to object and sue to stop it for some shortsighted and probably selfish reason.

That's kind of the point of democratic institutions, though: centralizing a lot of these directive powers leads to explosive efficiencies at the cost of liberty to, for example, surface objections as you illustrate. Or, more dramatically, throwing people who object into dark cells.

That's how autocratic regimes can take on megaprojects without a lot of the red tape that leads to, for example, a paralytically slow rollout of Seattle light rail.

You choose your poison.

Wouldn't you say the US is somewhat of an outlier w.r.t. government ability to undertake significant infrastructural projects?

As someone who has lived pretty firmly in both parts of the West: no, not really.

Denmark, where I live now, has the luxury of commanding massive taxes from its citizens to finance its projects, all while putting a pittance of its share to its military. Denmark is also much, much, smaller than the US so the red tape that would be apparent at the size of the US is less apparent at the size of 6 million people.

We also overspend on grotesque, predatory contracting firms, just as the US does, to finance our public projects.

> Denmark, where I live now, has the luxury of commanding massive taxes from its citizens to finance its projects,

Well, so does the US - which is also able to do defict-spending much more easily due to the USD's role as a global reserve currency. But as you've pointed out, a huge part of it feeds the military-industrial complex - and that's a part (but not nearly the most important part) of how it struggles to expend on public infrastructure. Also, red tape is mostly not a per-capita thing; that kind of red tape is mostly in distributed execution rather than decision-making, legislation and such.

But point taken regarding Danish overspending on predatory contractors.

You cannot choose much poison either in one side.

This isn’t the traditional thought process on this topic. Traditionally, it was thought that the ills of resource allocation under democracy were far outweighed by the automatic optimization of the free market. The Soviets did a lot to suggest that the free market was actually better than central planning.

China is showing that with 21st century needs, technologies, and planning that may no longer be the case.

Right, but I wasn't referring to old thought processes. I was referring to current.

Looks like China is attempting a hybrid approach. Free market with the government intervening whenever and wherever it feels like.

They still get some optimization and some otherwise-impossible-projects. I'd say the jury is still out on this strategy.

> Looks like China is attempting a hybrid approach. Free market with the government intervening whenever and wherever it feels like.

A caveat I'd add is that the Chinese government is subjective to the party. China's accomplishments are significant but they tend to be secondary to the political wellbeing of the CCP.

That wellbeing is secured though the harsh and thorough quashing of dissent.

I'd criticize China but CCP's most repressive aspects seem to be finding widespread appeal here in the US.

> I'd criticize China but CCP's most repressive aspects seem to be finding widespread appeal here in the US.

And so does Russia, which is another effective repressive dictatorship. From my perspective, they're just exceptionally adapt at pushing their propaganda abroad.

Historically, the USA was the only one doing that, but it's no longer the only player. (To be clear, I meant spreading propaganda abroad. The USA is at least currently not a repressive dictatorship. And I doubt it will become so before I die.)

It's real wealth and productivity growth has dramatically outpaced peer nations over the last 40 years.

How much longer will the jury be out? Will it come back in my lifetime?

Yeah, it's going to come out in the next 10 years or so, 20 at most.

The question is whether the Chinese economy will take a similar trajectory now to the Japanese one in the late eighties and through the nineties, with a period of extreme growth followed by mostly stagnation.

It could very well be that the Chinese model is good at catch-up growth so to speak, up to the level of an advanced economy.

I agree with the op that the jury is out on this and it might go different ways.

> productivity growth has dramatically outpaced peer nations over the last 40 years.

and yet, are the citizens getting their fair share of said productivity growth? Or has it been obsorbed by the CCP, in which the wealth is then allocated to something that said citizen would not have chosen to allocate to?

Given that hundreds of millions of people living in it had to go outside to shit in an outhouse four decades ago, but are now living first-world and nearly first-world lifestyles, you tell me if any of that wealth made it to them.

People tolerate the CCP because of the clear material gains they have seen in their lives. If some strongman authoritarian stood with a megaphone on Main Street and credibly promised Americans one tenth of that gain in prosperity, they'd elect him dictator for life.

The same basic rags-to-richest pattern was true for most US citizens a century ago, and no we're now objectively some of the richest people in the world. But despite this progress, US politics does not indicate that the US populace is deeply satisfied. Which leads to the real question: will the CCP still be as popular when material progress plateaus?

> will the CCP still be as popular when material progress plateaus?

they know they won't be - people's demand continues to grow, and not just material wants, but "spiritual" wants (aka, they want more representation in the political system to make decisions). Of course, this only manifests after some material wealth threshold has been reached.

It's also why i conspiratorially believe that the CCP is deliberately ensuring chinese yuan is continuously debased, and kept artificially low. It ensures that the people's wealth in general is not high enough to reach that threshold i mentioned above.

I mean, the USA has enjoyed more than 40 years of prosperity, so if that's the cutoff, the winner is already decided for some time.

I wanted to give China a chance, but if you don't... :)

> China is showing that with 21st century needs, technologies, and planning that may no longer be the case.

maybe. a considerable number of chinese projects are very flashy and the planning doesn't take into account upkeep. a good example is country gardens forest city:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_City,_Johor

What I've heard — and I don't claim any real expertise — is that the city was built by a significant amount of private money and certainly private companies, and what made the city fail was several different governments all deciding that they didn't want this sort of thing, specifically China wanting houses to not be investments and restricting how much money Chinese citizens could take out of the country, while Malaysia started off in favour of it but then decided that "foreigners" (which in the face of Forest City would have been Chinese) shouldn't be buying up housing in Malaysia.

That's not really a sign of central planning failure, any more than, say, California City — failure, sure, but not due to what distinguishes economic central planning from capitalist diversity's self-balancing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_City,_California

Centrally planning a project is not bad and it was not bad even in USSR. What usually goes wrong is the implementation, where lack of ownership and widespread corruption makes the resource utilization perform pretty bad.

Socialist or Communist countries did some good projects, I saw quite a lot. Implementation, management and long term operation went bad.

A good plan is one that can be executed. Assuming no corruption where widespread corruption exists is a failure in planning.

Maybe, but China has also poured so much capital into infrastructure projects that don’t deliver ROI. This has harmed their longterm growth. We didn’t do enough when interest rates were low and we have a hard time with complicated projects, but China isn’t perfect at this, either.

Also they march people out into fields and execute them at point blank range. Worth keeping in mind.

> Also they march people out into fields and execute them at point blank range. Worth keeping in mind.

Some of us think the US's predicament with lethal injection drugs is quite funny and bringing back firing squads would improve things.

China isn't autocratic. That's just cope.

> That's kind of the point of democratic institutions

I think the problem is that American "democracy" is frequently undemocratic. If a clear majority of voters support a project or policy, it may still be blocked through various political/legal/regulatory means.

> If a clear majority of voters support a project or policy

thing is, projects run into reality. if a majority voted to build the starship enterprise today would it make sense to do it just because a majority wanted it

Healthcare access isn't sci-fi

yes and believe it or not healthcare runs into real constraints and concerns about equity, etc.

suppose a rare disease is only well researched in a few white families. lets say, the mennonites. curing the disease is possible, but expensive. should everyone else be forced to subsidize it? what if the markers are known and parents choose to have kids anyways even though they have the markers.

does the situation change if its sickle cell anemia?

This is a good point. If you imagine that by healthcare people mean an imaginary expensive Mennonite disease instead of the ability to see a doctor and receive treatment for common diseases and injuries it becomes very murky indeed.

Combining the two seems a design flaw. The one requires research, experience, training, labs, clinical trials etc etc. The other little more than a database.

yeah i should have said ashkenazi instead of mennonite, but i didn't want to come off as or attract a certain type of comment.

this is a real thing. Gaucher's disease, while anyone can get it in principle, is almost entirely a disease that afflicts ashkenazim. the treatment is cerezyme, which is one of the most expensive drugs, and you must take it for life.

and you missed the comment about sickle cell (only affects west africans and people of west african descent). which is now curable, but VERY expensive to cure.

I didn’t miss anything. You can substitute in any real or imaginary rare and expensive disease if you want to define “healthcare” as something that excludes the general ability to see doctors and receive treatment for common illnesses and injuries.

If you’re dead set on arguing about an arbitrary imaginary definition of a word, the world is your oyster. You can say sickle cell or Methuselah Syndrome or Tandy’s Malady, it’s all gravy if you can convince your mark that whatever you’re talking about is the same thing as the broad concept of healthcare.

what does it mean if healthcare doesn't include the corner cases though? where do you draw the line? is cancer treatment healthcare? what if you have a rare cancer?

im not the one arguing from a made up definition here. almost ANYONE would consider cancer, rare cancer, sickle cell treatments, and gauchers treatments "healthcare". its disingenuous to put those outside the bag of things called healthcare just because its inconvenient to your worldview

heres a radical thought, if a group of people, be it 2, 5 og 250 million wants to build the starship enterprise, how about we say "sounds fun, have at it", and let them mind their own business? and in this pristine new reality, how about we DONT let them put their grubby fat hands into the remaining peoples pockets to fund it? In exchange, when the naysayers to the enterprise projects wants to make something, the enterprise fans will also not loot pockets.

Now we have utopia

> Now we have utopia

A good example of such a libertarian utopia would be a recent experiment in Grafton, New Hampshire. They had a real bear of a time.

https://newrepublic.com/article/159662/libertarian-walks-int...

and how about regimes where people think they have a right to other peoples life? history would suggest that this mindset means that people are outright gonna get slaughtered.

buy a gun and bearspray, if you dont want to have bears invade your property, put a fence. If someone doesnt want to pay for that and risk it, well, I am kinda okay with that too. If someone breaks their legs and needs help to complete their bear fence, I will help them too, but if they DEMAND and insist they have a god(=government) granted right to force me to help them with their fence under the threat of imprisonment, I will not, and I will consider them criminals as they are

> how about regimes where people think they have a right to other peoples life?

They have fewer bear attacks

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_w...

Funny you mention Seattle’s light rail. The first part of New York’s subway system was built in 4 years and had more stops than Seattle’s light rail does after 15 years.

We (Americans) absolutely built big public projects in reasonable timeframes a century ago, and we don’t now. Attributing it to the form of government seems to miss the mark.

Probably a lot easier to just cut down all the trees in the midwest and throw them into a deep ocean trench every few years than to go up against the activation energy you will face converting a desert environment into something presumably more wet and less hot. This isn’t Arrakis.

Can you explain the tree-cutting rationale ? Wouldn't cutting all the trees have a masse effect that would lead to desertification ? i.e. can you pitch me your project :) ?

Have you seen a lot that's been clear cut right after and then after 5/10/20 years? They've got some near me where they cut adjacent lots every so often and they're on a cycle to do it again after whatever the interval is.

If you cut the whole thing down at once, yeah, maybe it won't come back. But if you do a reasonable section, it comes back alright.

So, current management practices are only cut down what you need to produce lumber and other wood products and wood adjacent stuff; plus the extras that get cut and don't make it to the mill whatever.

I think the proposal is to cut more, and drop them off into deep ocean where they won't decompose much. As trees grow, they turn environmental carbon dioxide (and other inputs) into wood, but an established forest is mostly steady state in carbon dioxide... cutting it down and depositing it into the ocean is a way to keep the existing carbon dioxide as wood and turn more carbon dioxide into new wood.

> drop them off into deep ocean where they won't decompose muc

I’m sure that won’t come with any unintended consequences

It's where oil comes from that caused the CO2 that the trees are collecting; it's just closing the cycle.

Probably will spark a bubble in deep sea distressed wood salvage operations when that becomes feasible.

Logs that long ago got stuck on river bottoms on the way to mills are pretty valuable now if they're in good shape.

Is that just because they're old trees, which are stronger than the fast farmed ones we get today?

That's part of it, but also people enjoy the colors that developed in the wood while it was resting in the river.

>response would be "government overreach!" on one side and "what about threatened species X that thrives in the sparse desert?" on the other. And if you did get such a project approved

Maybe what is needed is a project to teach people how to think without making unforced errors.

> some elaborate supply chain would arise to provide plant seedlings at 10x the normal price

The beauty of it is, this one stone could kill many birds, even giant ones like this.

I don’t think this would be a good idea… these areas are not the result of desertification but are naturally desert ecosystems. The only way to make them anything else would be to take even more water from bordering non desert areas, which are already severely impacted by all of the water taken to support huge cities and green lawns in the southwest deserts.

For carbon storage it would make more sense to regrow forest in places that naturally have water and soil that support forest.

Plenty of places have water even Tucson

https://youtu.be/I2xDZlpInik

US southwest is a desert, but there are significant areas that used to be grassland and shrubs that turned into bare rocks due to excessive grazing in the 19th century.

Related https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41951420 "We Can Terraform the American West"

> wish other major powers would commit to similar projects

American engineering around the Mississippi River is massive. As is our hydroelectric engineering, and reclamation of urban and farm land. We don’t really have a lot of fucked territory that needs to be terraformed.

IMO Missippi shipping good example of lack of commitment. Low water levels already curtailing barge activity. It's a massive effort, but not really sufficient.

> not really sufficient

Our barge use is crippled by the Jones Act, not water levels. Make it lucrative to ship by barge and the incentives will get the levels back up.

Making shipping lucrative (which US should) can further increase utilization. Issue with Missippi traffic is existing shipping, i.e. those that operate under Jones, are already crippled by reduced water levels as result of heat/drought/climate change. So it's a water level issue, which translates infra commitment issue... not unlike the green belt. Climate change means you have to invest more just to stand still.

E: Like don't get me wrong, internal waterways is a geographic blessing for US, but it also always required enormous/expensive (army) engineering efforts to keep it viable for modern operations (larger barges etc). It's one of those case where terraforming/technology has outstripped natural capacity, but it's possible to augment geography to facilitate more technology, but right now augmentation efforts are not sufficient, not just to improve through put, but to maintain it, because geography can decline.

> it's a water level issue, which translates infra commitment issue

The point is with the Jones Act there isn't much value in barges. So other uses of the water are prioritised. Adding water doesn't have an ROI commensurate with alternative uses.

The mississippi utilization priority is commercial traffic, which is prodominantly barge traffic for all sorts of critical bulk cargo. It's an extremely valuable waterway that can't be replaced by rail or truck. It's not about adding water, it's about dredging to maintain same water levels or building out infra to be more resilient to water level changes, in so far as Jones Act is concerned, along with Foreign Dredge Act, it limits non US ships from conducting maintainence, which precludes bidders like the Dutch who are much better / economical at maintaining water ways. The ROI is massive, but there exist lack of commitment to fix, at least with urgency that, which is in part legistlative.

I didn't know about the Jones Act

""" It requires that all goods transported by water between U.S. ports be carried on ships that have been constructed in the United States and that fly the U.S. flag, are owned by U.S. citizens, and are crewed by U.S. citizens and U.S. permanent residents """

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_Marine_Act_of_1920

Jeez that act is ridiculous - the U.S. would sanction other nations for such a law on their books.

Some stories I heard while living in China. A couple of decades ago farmers in china’s arid regions used to be tasked with planting trees, they would plant them upside down because they knew they didn’t have enough water to feed the trees and their crops. The Gobi was planted with trees a few times to reduce dust storms, but it takes a lot more than just planting trees, so the dust storms would always invariably return as the trees died out. There also used to be a graduation requirement that all students plant trees to graduate, they had farms dedicated to this, and they would dig out the trees planted by the last class so the next class could re-plant them.

I have no idea how effective today’s efforts are compared to efforts of the past. They could have solved the water problem with irrigation or are using more drought resistant trees. It could be that the green belt is going to stick around this time, if the experience is different from the Gobi experience somehow.

> they would plant them upside down

That makes no sense. It takes more effort to plant a tree upside down and not irrigating it than it takes to plant it the regular way and not irrigating it.

Maybe if the trees are planted correctly and are still alive, the government would requires the farmers to water them or face punishment, leaving no water for the crops.

They didn’t want the trees to suck up limited water, but wanted to still say they planted the trees. My guess is that ground water and run off was involved, they weren’t going to irrigate it either way because they couldn’t.

One of the reasons for the decline of the Ottoman Empire was that sultans spent precious labor and resources on grand projects like this, for example around the Arabian peninsula as well as the Sahara. This ended up contributing to the bankrupting of the empire, which required them to take heftier and heftier loans from Europe and Russia.

The Ottomans taking loans from the Russians, their traditional enemy, seems odd. I know they were reluctant allies when fighting Napoleon, but I've never heard of such a financial arrangement.

I'd enjoy reading if you have any pointers to such projects. Not coming up with any from web search and asking a LLM. Closest might be the Hijaz Railway and maintaining a large military presence in desert regions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_Empire#Decline_and_mod...

"As the Ottoman state attempted to modernize its infrastructure and army in response to outside threats, it opened itself up to a different kind of threat: that of creditors."

That's the closest thing I found related.

The US "Shelterbelt" project in the 1930s in response to the dustbowl was of a similar vein. It involved planting over 220 million trees.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Plains_Shelterbelt

It is being done in Africa, a 4000-mile wall south of the world's largest desert, the Sahara, called the Great Green Wall. Some references below. Pretty amazing stuff.

[0] https://www.bbcearth.com/news/five-ways-the-great-green-wall...

[1] https://sequoiares.org/research/posts/The-Great-Green-Wall

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Green_Wall_(Africa)

Risk of Collapse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Green_Wall_(Africa)#Risk...

Monitoring (or lack of) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Green_Wall_(Africa)#Moni...

That is amazing.

I wonder whether this is working, as far as preventing desertification goes. The project has critics. It might just the state declaring victory?

Edit: apparently it’s controversial.

Will China’s “green Great Wall” save it from encroaching sands?

https://www.economist.com/china/2024/12/05/will-chinas-green...

https://archive.is/FVimm

That is probably why China is doing weather modification:

https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/03/asia/china-weather-modificati...

However people in India may have something concerns:

https://www.downtoearth.org.in/science-technology/-weather-m...

Yeah we are like kids playing match sticks!!! Just because we can, we shouldn't just do it!

Sandstorm days in BJ went from ~30s per year in 50s to single digits post 2000s. It's working, but sandstorm days also picking back up due to climate change (also increasing floods and other enviroment disasters), so more accurately to suggest it's mitigating.

Every project has critics, but it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness. See the man, the wife, the donkey, and the critics.

Yes, it's possible it will not deliver, but this seems to be classic way to combat desertification. Africa uses similar approach for Sahara.

> ”The initiative combines solar-powered sand-blocking technology with extensive vegetation planting to stabilize the desert’s edges.”

What sand-blocking tech is that? Does anyone know?

I think they put solar panels up and plant some bushes under the shade

And solar powers water pump (or condenser)?

They might be referring to dependence on solar-powered water pumps to irrigate the green belt, or the use of a field of solar panels with vegetation underneath to break up wind-driven sand migration. Another source discusses the construction of meter-high earthen walls, though its unclear how widely that was done. They're planning on building more solar and wind there, and China's UHV (ultra-high-voltage) grid will allow that power to be shipped east to where demand is highest:

https://interestingengineering.com/energy/chinas-largest-des...

> "Further energy development is underway in the Taklamakan Desert. The China Three Gorges Corporation plans to build a massive energy project featuring 8.5 gigawatts of solar power and 4 gigawatts of wind energy, expected to be completed in four years."

I'm not sure if it applies here but I read an article about similar efforts in Africa and their technique was shaping the sand into little hills and then adding the vegetation to retain the little hill which reduced the flow of sand shifting due to wind.

Plants

Perhaps giant solar powered bulldozers? The article is a joke when it comes to details and citations. It reads like a press release.

I've been to Turpan and the Tarim Basin area, which is on the northeast edge of the desert. It's the only place I've witnessed a sandstorm, and it's very hot ... local people told me not to leave rented bikes parked in sunlight as the tires were at risk of bursting.

Many centuries ago, local Uyghur people developed ingenious mechanisms to channel snowmelt from the northern mountains for irrigation ... basically covered stone channels that stretch for thousands of miles and enable crops like grapes and melons to be grown. In Turpan itself, grape trellises are grown over many sidewalks which cools pedestrians and looks quite nice.

Shouldn't you be able to see that on sattelit pictures?

It's visible. Start at Taklamakan Desert Highway and go along it.

TBH, I would like to know how much water it take to grow trees around the highway through middle of desert, but that is for another topic.

They use drought resistant / low water plants, bunch of retainment strategies (membranes, local rainfall water storage). IIRC still need to truck/pipeline/drip irrigate some water when plants initially growing (more water hungry), but the goal is to pick right plants that can survive on local conditions.

Yeah, I have read a lot about the plants, Populus Euphratica, and a lot of others, but it still...

There just isn't enough rainfall. Annual average precipitation in the Taklimakan Desert is less than 100 millimeters. With drip irrigation, they can probably keep at it at reasonable expense, but that place is horrid. Just look at it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuylRKAK1Tc

IIRC ~40% is in arid regions, rest in semi arid or better regions. I think in arid regions they'd prioritized desert margins with 100-200 mm rain. <100mm is extreme arid zones, i.e. central Takilmakan. I'm not sure if they'd even bother with that.

This is a video by the government, not a independent news source?

I can't really tell from the satellite photos. Looks like there is a river with some agricultural fields and green stuff next to it.

Very interesting topic but the article strikes me as being blogspam adjacent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Green_Wall_(China) cites https://www.yahoo.com/news/china-completes-3-000-km-11254926... which is one of many press articles that only cites (but does not link) state media.

The Economist has paywalled writeup https://www.economist.com/china/2024/12/05/will-chinas-green... that is a bit skeptical of the project's impact (unlinked claims at least half due to increased rain, not human efforts) and sustainability (also unlinked, but I'd guess correct, it seems somewhat similar projects such as the great plains shelterbelt in the US decline unless maintained).

Surely there must be an afforestation/macro ecological engineering geek out there who has blogged on this in depth, would love to read it!

Vegetation-type is determined by temperature and precipitation. You can't un-desertify a true desert unless you irrigate. Most of these projects that "succeed" - miraculously correlate with good rainfall experience.

Most of the Sahel revegetated all by itself, when the decadal drought ended in the 90's.

Re-vegetation projects can help put vegetation back when it's been removed by shitty management practises like severe over-grazing.

It can also help speed revegetation if there are no nearby seed sources and dispersion speeds for those species are low. But dry-adapted vegetation seeds can usually persist for very long periods of time waiting for water.

> unless you irrigate

One of the reasons for the interestingness of speculative proposals like Qattara, seawater-for-Salton, and it turns out an even more ambitious project to pump seawater from the Bohai Sea to Xinjiang.

The west should help fund this and we should hint at other sand hills in the world to do the same.

Im sure the reality on the ground will be less disappointing with these than it was with the claims of russian aemy to be the 2nd mighty in the world. Those autoritarians would never lie to us.

China may well have replaced the USSR as the latest bogeyman to keep attention away from whatever war crimes the US is currently supporting or committing, but all I can think about is the ~$10T spent on and millions of lives lost to the "War on Terror" and what could've been done with the money instead.

I mean just look at the high speed rail transformation in 16 years [1].

China is not without its issues but neither is the US government and at least China is investing in long-term infrastructure for their people. Chinese foreign policy is also considerably less damaging than American foreign policy.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/xszhbm/chinese_hig...

China has built 30,000 miles of high speed rails it doesn't need [1], going into $1 trillion of debt and other liabilities. Just keeping up with its debt requires $25 billion annually. Incidentally, Chinese local governments are now $11 trillion in debt [2], with all provinces except Shanghai in 2023 being positive on revenues. And now there are around 4000 ghost railway stations [3]

[1]: https://www.wsj.com/world/china/xi-high-speed-trains-china-3... [2]: https://www.wsj.com/world/china/china-economy-debt-borrowing... [3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhclmurNUuw

What does this have to do with anything?

Is 25B in interest expenses extreme here?

Edit: oh just for the rail costs

jmyeet mentioned building rails, and baserev makes a counterargument, that it isn't necessarily a good "investment".

Counterargument based on retarded data. There's only ~1000 HSR stations with ~30 considered ghost, ~3%. It's not a good investment, it's a great investment. It's already profitable. Utilization is increasing YoY. All for ~1T over 20 years. Put it this way, US excessive health spending (~5% over OECD average works out to 2T/5T per year), PRC got entire HSR network for 6 months of excessive US health care spending that still delivers less life expectancy than PRC. This isn't even mentioning the 100s of billions PRC is saving not buying US/EU aviation or importing fuel. It's literally converting steel and concrete into forever import savings, and it's doing on the cheap while labour prices were (are) low - that blue collar cohort is only going to decrease with time. Better to build as much as possible now.

This is not to mention HSR is basically ONLY option for mass fast intercity travel within PRC... 1.3B people squeezed in populated area 1/3 size of CONUS = too much air cooridor congestion. There's literally no other option than HSR. Like air travel isn't going to make Chinese New Year happen.

Citations please

For context, 1 trillion US Dollars is about 50% of the cost of the Iraq War.

In WSJ article

> China State Railway’s liabilities grew to a record of about $860 billion as of September

Meanwhile it's about same as US military spending in one fiscal year.

I'd rather wasting money on things I don't need, rather than kill others.

>4000 ghost railway stations

lol wut. There are ~5000 rail way stations TOTAL, ~1000 HSR, of which ~30 are considered ghost, i.e. 3% wasted stations on size of PRC network is stupid efficient. The system is generating positive profit with increasing utilization, hence expansion.

Citations please

Sorry, not doing homework/playing this game for someone that posts FLQ media.

This is basic 101 level googlable information.

> China has built 30,000 miles of high speed rails it doesn't need

That's a ridiculous statement. High-speed rail is extremely heavily used in China (3 billion trips in 2023).

This is like dismissing the US interstate highway system as a useless vanity project. HSR is a heavily used, central part of China's transportation infrastructure that has made getting between major Chinese cities way easier, faster and more comfortable than it used to be.

National security angle is also often overlooked. China is not self sufficient in airplane manufacturing. Not now and back then it was only a plan.

What would they do in case of airplane export ban? They could keep existing ones airworthy, but transport capacity would be capped.

High speed trains are a viable alternative to airplanes.

China has the C919 (equivalent to a Boeing 737 or A320), which still relies on imported engines, but the country is also developing its own jet engines for commercial use. They would accelerate those efforts if there were an export ban.

Except for a couple of lines that connect the megacities of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, most Chinese HSR lines operate below capacity and at a great loss.

The bulk of the rail built in the last decade was to distant poorer regions who simply aren't willing to pay for faster transit.

If a line is operating at capacity, that's a problem. That's when you start getting overcrowding and delays. Overall utilization rates of Chinese HSR lines are fairly high. Less than 100%. More than 50%.

> to distant poorer regions

Rail is also used as a tool for economic development of such regions. The US built interstate highways across vast stretches of empty land, because the idea was to have a national grid that benefits the entire country.

wow, red scare capitalist propaganda from wsj.

> China is not without its issues but neither is the US government and at least China is investing in long-term infrastructure for their people.

Do you claim USA doesn't invest in long-term infrastructure?

>Do you claim USA doesn't invest in long-term infrastructure?

Do you have any examples of where it has invested in long-term infrastructure? I ask, because I can't think of any, beyond 'roads'.

When I think of infrastructure investments, I always think of long-term stuff, rather than, I don't know, a temporary detour.

And pretty much every functioning state makes infrastructure investments, otherwise it wouldn't be functioning.

So it it surprising to me someone would even question any big country's investing in infrastructure at all...

For example here's an announcement from dep of transportation:

https://www.transportation.gov/briefing-room/biden-harris-ad...

There's roads (including bridges), but also railroads and port expansions.

Also:

- Fargo-Moorhead Metropolitan Flood Risk Management Project

- Ecosystem Restoration in the Upper Mississippi River

- Reactor Demonstration Program in Kemmerer, Wyoming

The information is there, easily accessible on the Internet, you didn't need to ask me.

There's plenty:

The us army corps of engineers has been working on waterways for a very very long time. Their projects allow huge swaths of rivers stay navigable, provide irrigation and/or flood control, and so on. There are huge swathes of farmland that are able to provide a stable and steady supply of food as a result of htis effort.

TVA and Bonneville are government infrastructure programs that provide millions of people with hydroelectric power, and broader grid stability as a result of the infrastucrue they put in. Not to mention rural electrification via special welfare programs for farmers - the tax for that is listed as a line item in your electric bill.

The telecom system (including the Internet) is the result of government investment - in the form of: special taxes that city folk pay for rural folks access, research investment, direct research in various agencies, investment in cables being installed (for example - billions in grants were given to AT&T, verizon, et al to upgrade trunk and last mile lines to fiber), foreign policy to allow open communications and standards, and adoption by the military and other large agencies.

A whole bunch more too in the form of setting standards and providing grants to state and local governments to meet those standards (education, water and sewage systems, rail infrastructure, farm subsidies, crop and flood insurance, and so on) - some of these are more infrastructury than others, but included because (e.g.) having stable farms leads food security and therefore social stability and is kinda necessary for the rest to matter.

>China is not without its issues

That is a bit of an understatement, isn't it? https://www.ushmm.org/genocide-prevention/countries/china/ch...

What about all the Dreamers? Have you heard??

Yeah so, all the brown people that arrived in the United States as children when their parents "illegally" immigrated but have lived their entire adult lives here, have families here, have their jobs here and their cultural identity can literally only be American - also those "immigrants" (whose fate was also decided when I was is high school btw) we apparently are planning on the full scale removal of them from our society.

I've had people tell me "their kids won't save them anymore either" bc you kno, all the anchor babies. Literally happy about families being torn apart. That's a line the American people have crossed, not just our government.

Forced mass removal of minority population - where do you think they will end up if anything goes wrong between their arrest and deportation to somewhere that has no reason to claim them? I don't know how people can't see just how problematic this planning is.

Does this sound American? How high a horse will we ride after the bus loads of people whose lives we've upended for nothing?

We have a population replacement problem, er - well the world does really. People are exponentially valuable - the very definition of invaluable even. People provide for practically limitless potential with time and future generations considered. Money spent on immigrants is money very well spent if making money is the goal. Our goal is a color tho - well, more like a shade or an absence of color...

We have problems also. Our problems do not justify theirs and neither do their justify ours, that's not what I'm saying. We are all fucked up.

Rn tho - we should prolly just focus on our own stuff and thangs for the foreseeable future.

America 1st and whatnot.

Sry, I kno you didn't mean to overlook our issues with minorities rn and you were correct even but far too many people have shed tears to me about Ukraine and Israel and everywhere but here so much so that I just can't anymore.

Maybe we should have figured out a defense justification for high speed rail. That’s the justification for the interstate highway effort at least initially. Have to move tanks and APCs when shit hits the fan. HSR on the other hand has no advocate. You have the few people who nerd out about it standing against the profitable status quo with most people not really caring.

The U.S need to spend a ton to defend their "imperium" even though it is a bit different from how empires have worked in history. If it doesn't another country will take place and assume leadership of the world. The nice thing about the Pax Americana is that it is based on voluntary alliances that benefit from the relationship and more neutral third-party that are not punished for their neutrality (and thus are not available as allies against the leading coalition). So much so that you can count on your fingers the states that actually want to change the world order : Russia, Iran, China and North Korea and they are not even great allies to each other. So the status quo coalition is running the world and it's a good thing for the world. Interstate anarchy is a state of constant war and is awful for everyone.

Now you will say oh yeah but what about the war in Iraq. The thing is that it happened when US power was uncontested. It was a mistake in the sense that it has undermined the rules of the order it was supposed to guarantee. But nothing we should not be surprised that unchecked power is bad. Now that China is a (the only) real competitor with the U.S, the U.S actually has to be a good leader for the status quo coalition it gets its prosperity from. The equilibrium between leader and aspirant leader is good, let's hope it stays like that.

This smacks of "we need to commit war crimes because otherwise somebody else will commit war crimes". Theoretical atrocities are never justification for actual atrocities.

The "voluntary alliances" you speak of are basically the US, Canada, Australia and Europe. Africa, the Middle East and Asia didn't sign up for the absolute devastation we've inflicted on them, first with "normal" colonialism, now with economic colonialism.

I once heard it described that US foreign policy is to loot the Global South and US domestic policy is to divide up the spoils. We aren't the only perpetrators (eg [1]) but we certainly use sanctions and the IMF and World Bank to bully countries to our way of thinking. And that's before we even get started on all the coups the US has instigated, supported, backed and/or planned.

[1]: https://tehrantimes.com/news/489452/How-West-Africa-s-econom...

> Theoretical atrocities are never justification for actual atrocities.

If only that were true...

War crimes are the kind of thing the international is supposed to guard against. It is hard in practice because it needs to be enforced and enforcing it when there are no econimic incentives is ... unpalatable for any state. Which is why international order and US interests are generally tightly coupled. Now which war crimes are you talking about ? You need to be more specific. On the other hand, it's been a while since I have read "US marines destroy entire village killing women and children after raping them" so I guess not this kind of atrocities ?

I know the history. Yes colonialism was bad was it was mostly before the post war US led world order. If anything both the US and the USSR have sped up the end of colonialism which doesn't mean they each haven't promoted their own dictatorships against one another. That is not the current world we live in though. Indeed the voluntary alliances are mostly what we call "The west" or the "global North". The "devastation" of Africa isn't the sole responsibility of colonialism. It is mostly responsible for the dumb borders but all humans find a way to war against each other along ethnic lines. It was the case in Europe before WWII and it is unsurprisingly the case in Africa now.

Whatever you think about the IMF/World bank and economic colonialism, by which I take you mean any country taking advantage of its better economic position (China is also doing it) it is not the same thing as say sending your army to punish rebellion against the tax you impose on them.

https://acoup.blog/2019/12/05/collections-a-trip-through-thu... https://acoup.blog/2023/07/07/collections-the-status-quo-coa...

I am pro international order and totally for the allied nations not to follow along when the leader is abusing its power but I still think that world order is preferable to intersate anarchy.

Nobody ever signed up for anything. Making the world a better place is a hard problem.

> The nice thing about the Pax Americana is that it is based on voluntary alliances that benefit from the relationship and more neutral third-party that are not punished for their neutrality

Talk the talk

"Trump threatens 100% tariff on Brics nations if they try to replace dollar" [1]

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgrwj0p2dd9o

Meanwhile the US uses it surpluses of wealth to do… what?

Optimize ad sales to 16 year olds and fund genocide in Gaza?

Support Ukraine against invasion from Russia. Support Taiwan against invasion from China. Investing in reusable rockets, pushing humanity out into space. Supporting new technologies like augmented reality, AI, satellite internet, self driving.

Keep in mind China puts their money in these things too! Except they're on the opposite side and maybe spend a bit less on the military

Don't forget bailing out banks that fueled bubbles. With the money that went into that we could had by now a the Sahara rainforest.

Have you actually looked into "bailing out banks" (which is called Troubled Asset Relief Program), because if you have you would have learned that the US Government actually made ~$15 billion in profit after selling off the toxic assets 6 years later. Not to mention the money the government made thru preferred stock repurchase by corporations and other things (interest etc) the US Treasury booked a total profit of ~$121 billion.

Sorry for calling you out but I'm just very tired of purely emotional responses to this topic because people actually just refuse to go thru the facts of how events transpired and their consequences.

EDIT: You can see this for yourself from ProPublica https://projects.propublica.org/bailout/

Yes, the US government did make a profit on those assets but what did the bailing out the banks cost everyone else?

I have always wondered why the US doesn't use the trillion dollar deficit to fund healthcare for all.

Republicans always find money for more tax cuts but never social security...

Wow you mentioned a lot of topics

Reply on news.ycombinator.com