As someone who loves trains I find this truly impressive and I wish my country cared half as much about trains as China does
Seeing my country of residence change for the better during my lifetime is a completely alien concept to me.
Let's not pertend that this is because China has socialized housing. They used to do decades ago, but it has been abolished for a long time. Although they do have affordable housing program like most of the city in the U.S.
In fact, China has one of the highest home price to income ratio (ratio of median apartment prices to median familial disposable income, expressed as years of income) in the world: https://www.numbeo.com/property-investment/rankings_by_country.jsp . Chinese people will need 30 years of disposible income to purchase an apartment; compare to 3 in the U.S., 7 in Netherland, 11 in France, and 9 in U.K.
Apartments in Beijing can easily cost double than a major U.S. city, while people in Beijing earn half as much. Here is a popular real estate website listing the previously-owned property (2bedroom between 90-120 m²) on the market in Beijing: https://m.ke.com/bj/ershoufang/l2a4 most of them are around 5000k RMB, which translates to 700k USD for 2b apartments. On the other hand, Beijing median monthly salary is 1548 USD (https://teamedupchina.com/average-salary-in-beijing/#Beijing_Salary_Data_Zhilian_Zhaopin), which translates to 10$ per hour assuming a 5 day work week and 4 week work month.
The high home ownership rate is likely due to a mix of false report and saving culture. In China, parents typically have a good amount of saving to provide their child (singleton because one-child policy) a home upon their marriage etc. This also explains why Beijing rent price is much lower than major cities in the U.S., despite its high housing price.
Chinese people will need 30 years of disposible income to purchase an apartment; compare to 3 in the U.S.
Who can afford a condo with 3 years disposable income in the US? My spouse and I make above average money in a below average cost city and we couldn't afford a condo here.
likely means the wage that reaches your bank account, i.e. wage - 401k, insurance etc
Well ain't that a shit definition then
Honestly, I am quite surprised how low tankies are willing to go to defend China. As a Chinese, it is very disheartening to me that people have never experienced or seen the suffering of living under an authoritarian government, are more willing to blindly defend it, than having a intellectual discussion.
Compare the prison population of the US to China's lol.
It is hard to imagine that an adult talks like this. People points out most Chinese own homes, as if it is some policies that the west can learn from. I pointed out the stats that proved it is more about culture than China's housing market.
Yet you are here just side stepping every way, accusing unrelated stuff, just to defend the CCP. I used to think people here who worship CCP are just misinformed, but you have proved that you are simply vile and obsessed.
It is totally okay with me that there are grown adults who have the mind of a teenager; I just feel dishearten about other people misled by your propaganda, simply because they, in their good nature, decides to trust your posts and comments.
There is no point in continuing this discussion, since you clearly are not in good faith and are just trolling around. I hope you feel good about yourself one day and start having proper conversations.
See you in my block list. Bye.
Looks like someone couldn't handle some actual statistics when presented with them.
OurToothbrush@lemmy.ml did. Oh wait, they didn't paste the specific numbers that are both widely known and readily available, able to be found within a few seconds using search engine, they only referenced them. My mistake, I had assumed you were capable of doing that. But since you're not:
World Incarceration Rates If Every U.S. State Were A Country
Honestly, I am quite surprised how low tankies are willing to go to defend China. As a Chinese, it is very disheartening to me that people have never experienced or seen the suffering of living under an authoritarian government, are more willing to blindly defend it
There are literally some "tankies" on hexbear that are in China and posting from China right now. @Flyberius@hexbear.net. There are some users here who are Chinese and grew up there (not sure if they'd want to be tagged though). There are journalists who decided to go live there in part because of how much more freedom they are afforded there, people like Ben Norton, who you would probably also label a "tankie." All of whom can attest to how baseless and sinophobic all the fabricated "suffering of living under an authoritarian government" stories really are. We aren't all just clueless westerners, but your assumption that we are is also telling.
There are certainly different people with different preferences, and most Chinese people are indeed fine with CCP. A dictatorship has an obvious need to maintain many nationalist, so it is not surprising that you can find Chinese who loves CCP.
Many people are more than willing to turn a blind eye on all the artists, journalist, and lawyer, who were arrested, since it has nothing to do when them. This is a emotional topics for me, because one of my highschool classmate has been seperated from her father, for he was advocating more transparent laws and enforcement.
There are plenty of Chinese mastodon instance, like https://douchi.space/explore, https://mstdn.moe/about, https://m.cmx.im/explore. Go there talk to them and see what they think.
Of course, you don't need to believe me, or people on mastodon, or journalist from all "mainstream media"; and just trust people on hexbear. But that will likely be no different from people who only believe fox news and infowars.
There are certainly different people with different preferences, and most Chinese people are indeed fine with CCP. A dictatorship has an obvious need to maintain many nationalist, so it is not surprising that you can find Chinese who loves CCP.
Lol "it's no surprise the vast majority of people approve of and appreciate their government, since a dictatorship has to be maintained." Yeah, what an awful, terrible dictatorship that rules with such an iron fist that it forced the approval and support of over 90% of the population. Clearly, in any real democracy, everyone hates their government, like the in the US. You sinophobic liberals are such a transparent joke.
Many people are more than willing to turn a blind eye on all the artists, journalist, and lawyer, who were arrested, since it has nothing to do when them. This is a emotional topics for me, because one of my highschool classmate has been seperated from her father, for he was advocating more transparent laws and enforcement.
And the lead protesters in the US who advocated for... the state to stop murdering black people openly in the street were themselves murdered and disappeared. It's an emotional topic for me since people I knew in school were beaten half to death and permanently blinded by the police. The US is an infinitely more heinous dictatorship than China, violently suppressing anyone it deems a threat, while pretending they have "freedom" because they don't crack down on the ones that are of no threat.
There are plenty of Chinese mastodon instance. Go there talk to them and see what they think.
I don't need to, I can and do talk to plenty of people from and currently in China. Even a few irl!
Of course, you don't need to believe me, or people on mastodon, or journalist from all "mainstream media"; and just trust people on hexbear. But that will likely be no different from people who only believe fox news and infowars.
It's not about trusting people on hexbear, it's about trusting the population of China, which again has overwhelming support for the CPC. It's also about being able to plainly see what the CPC does both domestically and internationally. I trust the Chinese people.
Parenti quote
If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard.
By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative.
If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology.
If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom.
A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them.
If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained.
What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.
Hot take: Japan invented the bullet train, but China perfected it.
If perfected means they put it even where probably there wasn't a need for it, then yes. HSR is fantastic for connecting big cities, but it's also very expensive and sometimes China has prioritized HSR rather than regular rail, even though there wasn't a strict need for very fast expensive trains. Sometimes slower, more frequent and cheaper low speed rail can make more sense.
It's not bad per se, but it's money that could be used for better purposes.
Counterpoint: HSR is far more energy efficient than air travel, which would otherwise be the preferred option because regular trains are just not fast enough for country as big as China. Even when the electricity is generated from coal, the simple physics of not needing to literally defy gravity significantly reduces the carbon footprint of the trip.
A huge W for public transport. I assume the PRC already owning the land is significantly decreasing bureaucratic cost / time, allowing for such fast advances.
In sharp contrast the US (and some European countries) keep running after tech bro "innovations" like the hyperloop rather than sticking to actually working systems. Most of them will never see a real purpose because they were never realisable in the first place or will be slimmed down to a point where conventional public transport would have been the better option. And tbh, most of them are really just bait to keep those countries in a state of "looking for alternatives" whilst their current infrastructure is rotting away. And with especially the US being a nation centered around individual transport the vision for public transport is imo clearly lacking.
Europe in general isn't hit by that as much, seeing the benefits of current public transport solutions (at least nowadays... the 90' and 00' were different thanks to neoliberalism and making short term profits instead of doing long term investments), but it is hindered by the clusterfuck of nations / different railway standards. The EU is trying to manage some of it (with ETCS / ERTMS) as well as the new coupling standard (DAC) and track gauges slowly but steadily going towards 1435mm but there are still a lot of things to do such as a transition towards a standard current or even more important: unified train registration (atm a train/carriage needs to be registered for each country separately which leads to unnecessary train switches at border crossings). For example Italy requires carriages to have a fire extinguishing system whilst some other EU countries don't or some mountainous countries require specific braking tests. Having unified safety standards would make things a lot easier.
But at the upside at least some European railway companies do have a vision. For example, the ÖBB (Austrian federal railways) plans to have high speed rail connecting the main cities as well as European alpine corridors like the Brenner, Koralm and Semmering, regional trains for distances covering abt 200km and are reachable in abt 2 to 3 hours and (sub-) urban rail for metropolitan areas. In bigger cities, they want to provide bike sharing at the stations whilst they want to make car sharing available in rural areas to help cover the last few kilometres through the mountains/woods/fields, where busses only go on a daily basis if you are lucky and the bus driver doesn't skip your stop and take a shortcut because they believe nobody will be waiting there anyways and they might reach said vision in the next upcoming years and likely less than a decade.
So TL;DR the PRC is profiting off of their property law, their ability to centralize standards and them going the (at the moment) optimum way instead of hoping for innovation from tech bros with fancy power point presentations and zero knowledge of physics, Europe is doing alright but is a bit of a decentralised mess and the US is getting a bit distracted by "innovations" and their mantra of individual transport.
(My experience in the area mainly comes from working at a state-owned railway company and being interested in the matter in general. If there is anything to add or if I have gotten something wrong, feel free to comment.) ^-^
Spain and France especially seem to be doing a good job building high speed rail:
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It'd be hard to quantify, but I'm sure some statistics person could compare transportation methods, that includes speed, distance, energy usage, population, capacity, and probably a few more, per capita.
You could isolate it to a country's top X biggest cities, and how traveling between them compares in all those metrics.
It's just a pity that renfe's new high speed trains built by Talgo seem to be a shaky and noisy experience as highlighted here:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dhEopBWNbTc
Do you think the PRC has high speed rail because of "slave labor?" What on Earth are you talking about?
Do you know which country built its railways by actual Chinese slave labour? USA.
For some reason it is always projection, even in such a completely unlikely case as this one.
Has any of this actually been built? Everybody's got "plans."
Elon Musk "plans" to build colonies on Mars.
Yes, this is a map of what was completed in 2018. China isn't the US, they don't give billions of dollars of public funds to grifters like Elon Musk, they actually build things.
As an example, China used more concrete for building projects from the years 2011-2013, than the US used in the entire 20th century.
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China has built entire ghost cities, bridges, subways and malls using Tofu Dreg construction. So yes, that is technically correct. China does indeed "build things."
The point of critical infrastructure is that it's supposed to endure, not have to be torn down again in a couple of years because it's unsafe to occupy or use.
Actually planning for the future if something the US can't even fathom doing. Remember this fearmongering article from the daily mail about a "ghost" subway station in Chongqing?
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Here it is now:
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Western countries look at China building a city where no people are, and project waste, when in reality its just the PRC properly planning and building cities, anticipating housing and infrastructure, before they need them.
Meanwhile the US doesn't do anything beforehand and cities become a sprawling suburb, car-centered wasteland. They let private capital seeking short-term profits build their cities, and turn the country into a wal-mart parking lot.
