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Comment by baserev | Hacker News Reader

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

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>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.

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.

> 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.

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.

What does this have to do with anything?

wow, red scare capitalist propaganda from wsj.

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