Chinese doesn't have tense at all. That's why China has been utterly unable to plan anything over the past 30 years whereas the United States with their nicely tensed language has deftly planned and organised lots of infrastructure for the future.
Indo-European languages tend to have a subjunctive mood, and while it's nearly gone in English, we still have the robust distinction between real and unreal situations that mood reflects. This is much hazier in Chinese; it's hard (for an English speaker, and I assume any Indo-European speaker) not to notice that Chinese sentences often don't bother to make a distinction.
The thing about western countries like the USA, which people often don't get is: they are old, they've built their sh*t decades and centuries ago, they were the first one building and use new fancy technologies, and now they have to live with it and can't just switch them as easily as people wish for it. Countries like China, who just now start building modern stuff have the benefit of coming late to the game, have not technical debt and old expensive infrastructure they have to honor.
So they advantage is not better planning, or throwing more money at it, but mainly being late to the game and learning from the mistakes of others.
Planning for future capacity is a mystery to English speakers for some reason.
>So they advantage is not better planning, or throwing more money at it, but mainly being late to the game and learning from the mistakes of others.
Have you ever looked at the five-year plans the Chinese government publishes? It's quite interesting how much of their economy is planned in advance.
There was no planning involved, it was just a housing-bubble which busted some years ago and devastated some companies along the way. USA had this in 2008 too.
Also, do you seriously think china will reach 4+ billion citizen in the next 10 years? They have less than half of this now and aim to have even less.
> Have you ever looked at the five-year plans the Chinese government publishes? It's quite interesting how much of their economy is planned in advance.
Yes, it is, and so do other countries. And all those plans are also struggling and failing regularly, in all countries. China is overall as good or bad as every other country in what they are doing, it's mainly their situation which makes a different in the outcome.
If you genuinely believe this, we must live in different realities or something.
Have a nice day, PurpleRamen.
As opposed to the US which has no high speed rail whatsoever. It's good to have infrastructure for the future!