Over the past 15 years, China has constructed 25,000 miles of high-speed railways, adding as much track each year as Japan’s whole celebrated “bullet train” network. Now, the party is coming to an end.
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Similar fates befell other stations, built by local governments in the vain hope that the bullet trains would stop and bring prosperity.
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The problem is that many of the bullet lines were built in conjunction with the local governments that sought to benefit from them, and many of those are now teetering economically.
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Much of that off balance sheet cash was spent via special companies on projects that look miraculous — expressways through remote mountains, high-speed rail lines connecting impoverished provinces away from the rising wealth of the east coast — but never generated the traffic to repay the costs.In many cases they were linked to a cyclical boom also involving private property developers, which built housing developments across the country, often connected to the new roads and railway stations. As the housing bubble burst last year, leaving empty apartment blocks, so the councils’ interest payments became due for the similarly empty stations.
Allowing government – especially local government – to do the investing is not a good idea.
But does it matter ? Much of China’s economy is a Potemkin village, ready to collapse at a moment’s notice. It is the way of dictatorships.
Also, isn’t this just all funny money circulating inside the mercantilist system ?
Empty railways connecting empty apartment blocks. Built using funny money and the savings of millions of poor saps who don’t realise that a property no one will ever occupy is worthless.
Bearing in mind the stupidity of the Western governing class, China should be making out like bandits. Instead, they’re fucking up in different ways but for the same underlying reason: a political establishment which thinks it can legislate away reality and which is focused on retaining power above all else.
If they maintain the infrastructure businesses *might* develop around it.
When the area around the Weymouth and Portland Sailing Academy was redeveloped for the Olympics the hope was that it would attract businesses and an eco system would develop where once the Royal Navy had been a big employer. It looked like a wasteland for a few years with roads seemingly going nowhere, but now its quite a thriving business environment.
First a few businesses were persuaded to open up then the busses were persuaded to go through the estate which made it more attractive for other businesses and now the marina has doubled in size, there’s a Lidl and a petrol station with a Bugdens and a Greggs and a drive thru Starbucks is just about to open. There’s also been an assortment of other businesses attracted to the general area to service the bigger businesses and the leisure industry that’s building around the marina and sailing academy and their workers eg cafes.
I’m sure other examples can be found.
Yarp, probably spectacular malinvestment, but:
Over the past 15 years, China has constructed 25,000 miles of high-speed railways
How many miles of high-speed railway do we have to show for all the money we’ve spaffed on HS2?
Nevermind, maybe the real HS2 is the friends we made along the way.
Much of China’s economy is a Potemkin village, ready to collapse at a moment’s notice.
Sure.
But, assuming their 25,000 miles (!) of new railtrack isn’t all made of papier mache and Rice Krispies, they’ve successfully built stuff that works. Might not be profitable, but at least it is real.
Same with the factories. We know Chinese manufacturing capabilities aren’t bullshit, because we’re communicating with each other on devices that were probably built in China and definitely include loads of Chinese components.
So, when the economic tide ebbs, China will still be a manufacturing superpower. If Foxconn went bust tomorrow, somebody else would step in to buy and operate their factories. Their supply chains, industrial machinery, skilled employee base, etc. wouldn’t disappear in a puff of bankruptcy.
Asia deals in tangibles, we deal in bullshit. Their children want to be engineers, Western kids want to be Tik Tok stars. How much of the British economy do we reckon is bullshit?
BiND, I’m not convinced that the Portland development has in any way justified the initial cost.
Whenever I’ve taken my lot to the sailing academy, it always seems shambolic, under-used and propped up with public or charity money (that may be unfair, but it’s certainly the impression).
The rest of it looks like cheap warehouse sheds with cut-price tenants, which the government would never have allowed to be built in such a location if it hadn’t been desperate to claim success for the ‘Olympic legacy’.
I’m sure Lidl would happily have opened there anyway, even without the Olympic stuff, if they could have got permission. There’s no decent supermarket on the island, or anywhere that side of Rodwell. And other things would have developed around them. But greenfield land, probably home to all sorts of rare littoral plants and wildlife, bang opposite Chesil Beach? Not a chance of planning permission if it hadn’t been for the initial Olympic stuff.
So at best the ‘Olympic legacy’ is a huge government subsidy to get around the problems that would otherwise have been caused by government planning restrictions.
Steve said:
“Asia deals in tangibles, we deal in bullshit. Their children want to be engineers, Western kids want to be Tik Tok stars.”
Not sure that’s just (or even mainly) a Western problem; go near any tourist place in Europe and you can’t move for Chinese girls making TikTok videos of each other.
High speed rail is meant to connect one important centre to another important centre. If the train stops multiple times on the way it will no longer be high speed.
These places may have got a rail service but it was never going to be high speed, so never attracting those who wanted a high speed rail connection.
I have used the high speed trains in China a few times now. The trains are very reasonably priced, impeccably clean, comfortable…….just as you would expect a fast train to be. Naturally on time to the minute. The Shanghai metro is much the same…ultra modern, clean….naturally not a single bit of graffiti, as seen in the West. Stations are equally impressive.
RichardT – Yarp, but go to the postgrad classes in any British university engineering faculty and you’ll also find hordes of Chinamen (or you could, up till recently, I think they’re rapidly deprecating the UK as a place to send students?)
Tangibles v Bullshit: they’re building next generation atomic reactors, while the British government can’t guarantee you’ll still receive electricity through the winter.
Their cities are full of brand new, gleaming skyscrapers. Our cities are Third World slums.
So, mebbe we should stop thinking we’re somehow better than the Chinese, and other Asian nations. They’ll still be driving around in affordable cars and putting the central heating on whenever they feel like it in 5 years time. The same might not be true for Brits.
When I were a lad, the received wisdom was that China is a basket case and could only (at best) make inferior copies of what we do. The people who complacently informed me of this did jobs that no longer exist in the UK. All gone to China.
And yarp, jobs are a cost, as Tim says.
But they’re also someone’s livelihood.
If, I say if, it makes sense to spend on railways in Britain then the problem to solve is that really only London has lots of direct services to many places.
Is it still the case that getting from Edinburgh to Coventry by rail is so messy that it makes more sense to fly? (Or has all the security theatre at airports made trains a better choice?)
Is it still the case that Manchester to Edinburgh requires one change of train in NW England, then boarding the mainline train to Carstairs where it will stop and split in two, half going to Glasgow and half to Edinburgh?
Might it be better to (i) scrap airport security theatre, and (ii) improve the roads?
Is it the case that railways don’t make much money from carrying passengers, it’s carrying goods that is profitable? Or is it the case that really the whole network is obsolete?
The last time I was on a genuinely impressive railway was on the underground in Hong Kong decades ago. Even my much more recent experience on the German railways was pretty bloody unimpressive.
dearieme said:
“Even my much more recent experience on the German railways was pretty bloody unimpressive.”
Last time I got a Swiss train, it was late!
But, assuming their 25,000 miles (!) of new railtrack isn’t all made of papier mache and Rice Krispies, they’ve successfully built stuff that works.
Maybe, maybe not. We have no idea of how much of that track is truly functional. We have no idea of how much of that track is tofu dreg construction. Nor do we have any real idea as to whether or not any of it has been properly maintained. Totalitarian regimes have been know to fudge things.
Might not be profitable, but at least it is real.
That’s the sort of thing I’d expect to hear out of Richard Murphy.
The reality of it is this: If it’s not profitable, then it’s only “real” until you run out of other people’s money.
Then it’s shit. Real shit. Which makes it a problem, as opposed to a source of accomplishment and pride.
If something real isn’t real useful, then it really doesn’t matter whether it’s real or not. What matters is whether it’s useful or not… not whether it’s real or not.
Their cities are full of brand new, gleaming skyscrapers. Our cities are Third World slums.
Quite right Steve, but many of these cities are devoid of inhabitants.
This is what I meant by Potemkin villages, these are literarly so. If the West sorted itself out and started reindustrialising ( !) then China would be in big trouble very quickly.
But it won’t. So they are safe for now untill the war with Taiwan starts or the Malacca Strait is blocked.
RichardT.
You probably wouldn’t start any industrial regeneration with the sort of subsidies the Olympics required but that’s just the same as the Chinese examples, spending the money first and hoping they will come.
WPNSA is a not profit, which we know is never a good idea if you want a well run business and furthermore its not allowed to compete on price with other businesses eg the marina. Also, a lot of what goes on there isn’t run by the Academy they are just the hosts to those organisations. I’ve no idea about their finances but I know they have to rely on grants or hand me downs for a lot of things.
The businesses I was I was thinking about was the likes of Sunseeker, G3 systems and HeliOperations.
On the subject of delayed trains, I’ve been delayed in Switzerland because of leaves on the track.
. . . the Chinese examples, spending the money first and hoping they will come.
An entirely false hope for the Chinese, it turns out, for there was no one to come. China recently announced (and this is what they admit to) that it had overcounted its population by approx 100 million. And because the miscounting was a result of socialist school resourse fraud (more resources for more kids = lots of paper kids), all the imaginary people were young imaginary people. So China’s terrible demographics suddenly became diabolical.
It does seem that central planning isn’t a particularly good way to allocate resources.
@PJF: so China overcounts population while we (presumably) undercount it.
No doubt the Romans would roar with laughter at such incompetence.
BiND,
“If they maintain the infrastructure businesses *might* develop around it.”
It’s hard to tell, depends on the project, but you can cite places like Chippenham and Swindon in Wiltshire that expanded because of the M4 being built.
And while I’m dead against building high speed trains in the UK, China’s might make more sense simply because the old railways were so slow and rubbish and the distances are so huge. The high speed line from Shanghai to Beijing cut the time down from 9 hours to about 4.
Otto – re: Chinese ghost towns, they are a fascinating example of planning failure and misallocation of resources, and it’s eerie and interesting to see the photos. But it’s not exactly typical of the Chinese and general PacRim experience. Is it?
I.e. it’s not all Rice Krispies and stickyback plastic, just some of it. The wealth that is flowing from the West to Asia is very real.
If the West sorted itself out and started reindustrialising ( !) then China would be in big trouble very quickly
This is the thing, I think you and we Westerners in general greatly overestimate our abilities to do things, and greatly underestimate the difficulty of doing them.
Because, narp, we couldn’t reindustrialise quickly at all. Look at the enormous difficulties the US and Europe are having in expanding production of something as simple and strategically vital as artillery shells. Look at the embarrassing difficulties the Scots are having in building a couple of ferries.
If there was a will to reindustrialise the West (and there isn’t) it would be a multidecadal effort, because most of the industrial plant, institutional knowledge and workers who are competent to work that industrial machinery no longer exist in the Western world. It was a hard scrabble from preindustrial poverty to the apex of the industrial revolution, once those muscles have atrophied it’s a hell of a job to build them up again.
CEPR did a fascinating report you might be interested in: https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/china-worlds-sole-manufacturing-superpower-line-sketch-rise
The upshot is that China is the 800 lbs silverback gorilla of global manufacturing and we aren’t even a spider monkey.
Dennis – Underestimating the Yellow Man: Maybe, maybe not. We have no idea of how much of that track is truly functional. We have no idea of how much of that track is tofu dreg construction. Nor do we have any real idea as to whether or not any of it has been properly maintained. Totalitarian regimes have been know to fudge things.
This is true, but we can make reasonable assumptions based on known facts about China. And we can reasonably assume they know how railways work. They do have their own successful space programme, for example. The Chinese aren’t daft.
That’s the sort of thing I’d expect to hear out of Richard Murphy.
The reality of it is this: If it’s not profitable, then it’s only “real” until you run out of other people’s money.
Then it’s shit. Real shit. Which makes it a problem, as opposed to a source of accomplishment and pride.
Candidly you are missing the point. They built 25,000 miles of railtrack in only 15 years, apparently. That’s an achievement, not something to scorn.
Much (most?) of that physical infrastructure will be of benefit to somebody, at some point, even if the original builders take a bath on the construction costs.
Compare and contrast with Western countries spaffing trillions of dollars on finance sector bailouts, welfare spending and pork barrel bills like the ludicrous Inflation Reduction Act.
But the meta context is, industrial power directly translates to warmaking power. From that pov, it’s foolish of Westerners to make the same mistake A. Hitler did about the USSR. No, it’s not a rotten edifice that will collapse when we kick the door, it’s a sleeping giant in the sense Admiral Yamamoto meant about the USA.
PJF – Chinese demographics are alarming, I wonder at what point the CCP is basically going to force people to breed at gunpoint.
You shag! You shag now!
DM – then boarding the mainline train to Carstairs
Ha! You won’t get me that easily.
dearieme said:
“‘so China overcounts population while we (presumably) undercount it.’ – No doubt the Romans would roar with laughter at such incompetence.”
Perhaps we should adopt the Roman census method and require everyone to return to his ancestral village to be counted.
Candidly you are missing the point. They built 25,000 miles of railtrack in only 15 years, apparently. That’s an achievement, not something to scorn.
Here’s the point: You seem to be confusing activity with achievement. Building 25,000 miles of track is only an achievement only if that 25,000 of track is actually useful. Otherwise, it’s simply a waste of time, money and industrial capacity and is therefore worthy of scorn.
Much (most?) of that physical infrastructure will be of benefit to somebody, at some point, even if the original builders take a bath on the construction costs.
Sure. Let’s build 25,000 miles of track on the off chance that someone might find some of it useful. Someday. Maybe. Why not? It’s not like we’re spending our money!
The most amusing thing about the drop in Chinese population is the one child policy.
The Chinese seem to have said ‘We’re competing with the West. The West are panicking about over-population. We must do something about it.’ Whereas the Indians, being more of a democracy, just ignored the whole business.
Perhaps they really didn’t accept that a major reason for Western dominance was that their bureaucrats simply didn’t have the power of the Chinese state. You’ll have noticed that the industrial revolution took off in the UK, where the state didn’t have the power seized by those damn foreign rulers over the channel.
Of course, since I was a bureaucrat, my opinion may be biased.
“Perhaps we should adopt the Roman census method and require everyone to return to his ancestral village to be counted.”
Of course they did no such thing. Why one of the gospel writers thought he could persuade his readers that they did is a mystery for the ages.
Dennis – Yes, pendantry and snark will make China go away.
Bboy – no, it wasn’t exogenous factors that led to the disastrous one child policy, but China’s tragic history of being a Malthusian trap.
However, what they’ve found is that suppressing their own people’s fertility isn’t like turning an on/off switch. Same with the Western world, merrily exporting their industrial capacity while destroying their own energy base for decades, and now belatedly reacting in horror at the predictable results.
Slightly OT but related to the decline and death of the West. The ‘British Army’ is now recruiting directly from Oogaboogaland, in darkest Africa:
More foreign nationals wey dey live outside di United Kingdom go fit join di British Army, dem don announce.
Dis one mean say citizens from Commonwealth kontris – wey include Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Cameroon, India, Australia, Fiji and Sri Lanka, among odas – go fit apply for “available roles” even if dem no ever live for di UK.
Di recruitment website of di British army wey make dis announcement say, di application window go dey opened for candidates from di Commonwealth kontris from 19 August and e go dey up for just one week, wey mean say e go close by 26 August.
E add say refugee or asylum seeker no dey qualified to apply. – BBC News
They’re not even “our boys” anymore. What a disgusting and laughable institution the ‘British Army’ is.
PS – when Charles dies, I can’t think of a more fitting epitaph than for his obituary to be written in retarded broken English on the BBC website.
Do we get a Bank Holiday?
If there was a will to reindustrialise the West (and there isn’t) it would be a multidecadal effort, because most of the industrial plant, institutional knowledge and workers who are competent to work that industrial machinery no longer exist in the Western world.
For once Steve I thoroughly agree with you. The only thing the UK’s got going for it is it’s hordes of desk jockies. If you could export management & administration the UK would be a world leader. Just read the papers. The “rights” to WFH. The government now passing a law that employees mustn’t be bothered in their off time. Aw, diddums!You get almost nothing regarding the people who are actually productive in the economy. They might not exist. The government just makes things harder & harder for them. The war on the car. Meaning people who do productive work either can’t easily get to it or it costs a fortune.
If you wanted to re-industrialise you don’t have the people willing to roll up their sleeves & get their hands dirty doing it.
Who’s the most important in an industrial business. And should get paid more?The power skirt in HR or the bloke pushing a broom round the factory floor? The latter. You can make widgits without the skirt. You can’t with a filthy factory floor. And there’s more skill in it.
You shag! You shag now!
The problem for the Chinese is the demographics are all wrong. They have something like 30 million more men than women, and to build a population it’s women that are the bottleneck, not men. One man can breed with 30 million women and make 30 million babies, in the same time one woman can only make one baby.
‘The ‘British Army’ is now recruiting directly from Oogaboogaland, in darkest Africa:’
This does have the long term effect that the Army will be quite prepared to crush any uprising by the natives.
Long term policy or just a desperate bodge to meet recruitment goals? I’d argue for my second suggestion. But no one is likely to deplore the ultimate result.
dearieme:
Is it still the case that getting from Edinburgh to Coventry by rail is so messy that it makes more sense to fly? (Or has all the security theatre at airports made trains a better choice?)
You can travel to Coventry directly from Edinburgh on the WCML; although it’s not especially fast (taking just under 5 hours) I wouldn’t describe it as messy either. I used to make day trips to and from Warwick University without any problems – and this was yonks ago. Flying wasn’t an option for me – I had a rail pass – so I have no idea if that was a preferable means of travel or not.
Is it still the case that Manchester to Edinburgh requires one change of train in NW England, then boarding the mainline train to Carstairs where it will stop and split in two, half going to Glasgow and half to Edinburgh?
No. There’s a direct service from Edinburgh to Manchester Airport via Piccadilly, which has been around for quite some time. It runs once every two hours, and doesn’t stop at Carstairs Junction.
Would have thought that all the stuff in the news about multiple derailments, fires and pollution on the Amtrak lines would focus attention on the Murkan network rather than casting aspersions on the Chinese and screeching Wogs
@CJA I think dearieme was remembering the great days of British Fail… rather than anything in the last 20 years.
I can’t be bothered to check but I presume these direct trains do not run on the Swiss clock face principle, and run at odd times a couple of times a day?
@TJ: spot on. The Coventry example was from student days when Courtaulds told me to fly to a job interview. The Manchester example was from a friend many moons ago.
Never mind: Two-Tier is going to reintroduce British Rail, isn’t he? I do hope he revives their brilliant “we don’t know whether we’re coming or going” logo.
“.One man can breed with 30 million women and make 30 million babies, in the same time one woman can only make one baby.”
I think not.The male refractory period is a minimum of 15 minutes for 18 year olds, and increases with age. So theoretically an 18 year old working 16 hours a day could impregnate 64 women per day, which for 273 days straight works out at about 17.5k women. Reality would be somewhat lower…….
Shanghai -Hongqiao is roughly 200k, HSR line built 2014………..The fast train takes about 40 minutes the slow train just u Nader an hour, as it stops at several stations on the way, Basically a commuter train. Accelerants to about 250 k between stations.
Typing not good as in hospital after new knee today.
@ dearieme – you can get from Edinburgh to Coventry on the train in 4 hrs 45 mins without changing, quicker than driving.
China has indeed built a lot of stuff and some of it is very impressive. However, its skyscrapers are no more impressive feats of engineering than the towers in the City of London. Of course it has more of them, it has 145 cities with 1m people or more.
Most Chinese cities, outside the shiny (but possibly empty) office towers and new good quality residential buildings, are utter dumps. And as Denis points out, too much useless stuff is no better than not enough.
China has colossal structural problems, awful demographics and is ruled by a fascist, totalitarian regime that’s no brighter than the monkeys in Parliament. As correctly noted by many here, some of the worst ambitions of the British ruling class are inspired by China. However to suggest the levels of oppression compare is laughable.
There are Chinese people trying to get in to the US via the Mexican border; that doesn’t suggest all is well in the People’s Republic….
Steve, regarding your earlier post on wasted money and general ineptitude….
I think that the UK and China started HSR projects about the same time While the UK still has no new HSR, China has over45,000k and still building . Lots of great new stations also. Plus all the trains to use them, and lots of electricity to power them.
Industrious people, the Chinese….they manage to build over half of the World’s ships, and a third of the World’s vehicles, oh, and reach the far side of the moon. The UK used to be that sort of country……what went wrong.?
The Fabians and their inevitability of gradualness Jim??
Just minor changes. Not enough to arouse adamant opposition.
Until finally here you (and the rest of us) are.
– The male refractory period is a minimum of . . .
He said breed with not have sex with. A healthy young male can produce hundreds of millions of sperm per ejaculation; with technical assistance it would be feasible to fertilise 30 million eggs in nine months. It was obviously hyperbole to illustrate the point about the male – female imbalance in China. No pendantry star.
The UK used to be that sort of country……what went wrong?
Isn’t it a case of ‘what went right’? We pay ourselves too well for routine manufacturing to be competitive with countries like China.
“The UK used to be that sort of country……what went wrong.?”
We decided to fight a war that hollowed out our population, and then as a consequence of that decision had to fight a second global war on multiple fronts that bankrupted us, and allowed the socialists to get a hold of us.
Isn’t it a case of ‘what went right’? We pay ourselves too well for routine manufacturing to be competitive with countries like China.
Don’t harsh Steve’s reminiscing about the good old days when men were men… Who happily worked 12 hour shifts 6 days a week in a tractor factory and died at 53 without a penny in their pocket. And with no complaining either, dammit.
TJ:
@CJA I think dearieme was remembering the great days of British Fail… rather than anything in the last 20 years.
Well, he did ask if it was “still the case”…
I can’t be bothered to check but I presume these direct trains do not run on the Swiss clock face principle, and run at odd times a couple of times a day?
I don’t know about the Coventry trains (and can’t be bothered to check either), but the Manchester Airport service is straight back-and-forth, so I think is timetabled to depart Edinburgh at the same point in the hour every two hours.
“Slightly OT but related to the decline and death of the West. The ‘British Army’ is now recruiting directly from Oogaboogaland, in darkest Africa…”
Importing foreign mercenaries to suppress the natives, using the natives’ money.
It’s over. We had a good run. But it is over.
Boganboy, luckily for us in Australia we a thriving mining industry exporting vast amounts of iron ore and coal to China. However, the idiot Greenies would love to stop that………if they succeed we in deep trouble. Your remark about gradual changes is close to the mark”
Dennis – Don’t harsh Steve’s reminiscing about the good old days when men were men… Who happily worked 12 hour shifts 6 days a week in a tractor factory and died at 53 without a penny in their pocket. And with no complaining either, dammit.
Well, I’m a grafter.
Not like my grampa, who dug coal out of the ground and smoked 100 fags a day. More like Japanese salarymen on course for the sweet embrace of a fatal heart attack before 60.
But, it’s not for me. It’s all for my wife, my children, my children and my wife. It seems to me that the Asians are eating our lunch, because they care more about their jobs than Westerns do theirs. I am mentally ill, but my OCD doesn’t let me get away with substandard work. What’s everyone else’s excuse?