Indonesia is inaugurating Southeast Asia's first bullet train, a significant component of China's Belt and Road infrastructure initiative.
This project is set to drastically reduce travel time between Jakarta and Bandung from three hours to 40 minutes.
The high-speed rail, named "Whoosh," is of Chinese make and will seamlessly link Indonesia's capital, Jakarta, with Bandung, the densely populated capital of West Java province, reported the Associated Press.
$7.3 billion for 142km of HSR THROUGH THE JUNGLE during the COVID-19 pandemic is honestly incredibly affordable.
The UK's HS2 and California HSR are both substantially more expensive (both on a per-km basis and on a per-time-saved basis), for example.
Chinese engineers are cheap, Indonesian workers are cheaper. Chinese workers are cheap too if they used a lot of those.
Chinese engineers in top cities (Beijing, Shanghai, etc.) get paid comparably to the West. An entry-level SDE at Alibaba in Beijing gets offered like 80k USD, which is close to the compensation in Toronto (~110k USD for an entry-level at Amazon), Berlin (~70k for the same position at Amazon), and London (~80k for the same).
Huh. That's impressive, but I guess poor countries are also often unequal countries. Does that go for civil and mechanical engineers as well?
No idea, that's not my industry. There's a reason Chinese people value education so much. It's a key driver in upwards socioeconomic mobility.