cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/41305880
China started their high-speed rail network by buying German trains, today their trains are faster than Germany’s and their rail network is more extensive and cheaper.
They’re investing in education, every step of the supply chain, and their chip companies, and bringing in foreign experts and equipment to fill in any gaps. That’s how you get an advanced semiconductor industry.
Trains are one thing, modern chip fab is a completely different. Buying older equipment is not going to get them anywhere but into the production of chips that have been on the market for 10 years already.
This is one industry where each generation has hard limits for manufacturing.
TSMC didn’t start by building current nodes, they started out 10 years behind and caught up, and eventually surpassed over decades.
There is a bit more history behind TSMC. You left out the bits where they partnered with other companies, like Philips, that gave them access to proprietary information. They continued building relationships with other large companies and investing back into their own business.
China isn’t doing that. China has had access to older fab equipment for years but still fails to truly innovate. If US companies could trust China enough not to steal modern tech, there could be some real benefits to having fabs in China. The world kinda figured out never to send proprietary information to China years ago. Companies still do and doesn’t take long for a thousand clones to pop up on Ali Express shortly after.
If it’s as simple as high-speed rail, the US can and will do it by themselves.
It’s been decades, if the US was capable of building a high speed rail network, they would have done it. We tried and failed. There’s 3 HSR lines, one of which doesn’t even average 60 miles an hour, but theoretically could do 180 if it wasn’t for the highways and NIMBYs.
Edit: There is 1 HSR line, the one in California is still being planned, and the brightline isn’t HSR.
China has no chance of winning against the US by this way
Every year they close the gap by spending hundreds of billions on schools and infrastructure, while we spend hundreds of billions on prisons and bombs.
Great example of another tech that is slowly bankrupting China because of it‘s overly excessive but poor implementation. One trillion dollars of debt and rising for a network that is barely used in most parts.
Did you just make that up? According to wikipedia (it cites a chinese-language source I can’t read), average occupancy was increasing until 2016, where the statistics end.
But we can infer later occupancy from other statistics:
Passenger trips per year increase every year, with a drop in 2020, but it went back up to 3.68 billion in 2023, 1.6x what it was in 2019 and 3x what it was when occupancy had increased to 72%
There’s issues, such as that it tends not to run through city centers, but lack of occupancy doesn’t seem like one. In any case, cheap intercity transit is a public good that benefits the whole country. Being able to travel 800 miles in 4 hours for 40 bucks is incredibly convenient.
What next, are you going to claim China is full of ghost cities because building enough housing that everyone can afford it is bad actually?
No you see China’s economy has to be failing, if it isn’t then it would be a good market to find businesses to invest in. If a large enough segment of the small capitalists – for whom the great superstructure of American cultural reproduction is geared toward – began investing heavily in Chinese industry and saw large enough roi, they would structurally oppose anti-Chinese domestic policy. Not to mention other economic consequences like creating a more robust and durable class of small capitalists. If small capitalists felt greater economic security as a result of Chinese investment, it would damage not only the foreign policy aims (war) of a large segment of the ruling class who wants to destroy Chinese (lets call it) political republicanism and raid it for its resources and labor a la early 90s Russia; it would also threaten ideological temperament of small capitalists who inform aspiring small capitalists and legions of lumpen workers, who always feel the pressure of capitalism’s natural tendency to crush their classes during economic downturns. If these layers don’t feel threatened by China, if the west can’t successfully blame them for problems we created, then those layers whose exploitation is so crucial to the various profitability schemes of the ruling class might be more amenable to social democracy or maybe even socialism.
The hate that westerners feel toward China is part fear that we will lose our social status, and part hatred of the conditions that allow Chinese markets to operate successfully and independently of our ruling class. Therefore, the Chinese economy must collapse, any day now…
Ideology is a hell of a drug
None of what you said is even related to the one trillion (and rising) debt in any way. Why don’t you stay focused on the argument but instead dump random facts into the discussion?
By the way you literally just have to type “china highspeed rail debt” in any search engine of your choice and get bombarded with facts about it. Why didn’t you even try?
