China has announced it’s ambitious plan to link 17 nations with high speed rail networks, extending all the way to europe and malaysia.
Read here.
If its so profitable, how come the private sector isn’t on board
lol. I believe, that private sector face very much limitations, so it is easier for the state to do that. But I can be wrong.
This is the biggest thing since the Berlin-Baghdad railway project.
Sieben, it won’t be profitable. It will be as much of an enormous cash sink and burning up of taxpayer’s money as the discontinued Concord, and the tunnel connecting England and France were.
Anyway, the world competes for control over Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and other former Soviet Central Asian nations for their resources. China has the nerve to declare it will build a railway across it? And declare its dominance over those regions? Do they realize how much Russians, Americans, British, French, and Middle Easterners will be fuming over this?
The idea is nuts, but if it works, that is, if you will be able to travel for reasonable prices, lets enjoy the rides and see it as a great piece of engineering.
Is it just me or is China sensing that it better spend some of the oodles of dollars they are sitting on in exchange for something, ANYTHING of tangible benefit, before it plummets in value?
I mean, as inefficient as government spending programs are compared to the market, if you can get X amount of real stuff now by spending it, vs say 50% of X later, it makes sense to spend it…doesn’t it?
China is going completely “infrastructure crazy”. Her highway system works at a mere 12% capacity. They are also building hundres of miles of high speed rail nework which won’t be profitable even if thrifty Chinese will give up their traditional, cheap and slow Soviet-vintage trains en masse. But again, high speed trains have never been profitable. I mean… not even richard Branson could squeeze money out of them despite massive government subsidies!
Waaaste of moooneeey.
Who is accepting these dollars in exchange for the goods and services needed in order to build this railway?
China wants to be paid back by countries that want to participate in the form of resources.
What are they smoking…though Einar might have a point.
I don’t know in the abstract, but it’s very likely that China was able to “Sucker” others.
Thanks. What made me think along those lines is the concept of the “crack-up boom”, when people holding rapidly depreciating currency rush out and spend it on just about anything, even stuff they don’t need, rather than watch their purchasing power just disappear. The goods they buy will retain value better than the currency and possibly be bartered away later. If the Chinese authorities know that their pile of dollars is about to go “poof”, it makes sense. Of course buying gold and other more tradeable goods than a transnational rail network makes even MORE sense, but there are limits to how much of that stuff they can buy without pushing the prices up drastically. So some portion of their immense holdings will be looking for a home in projects like these. Inefficient allocation of resources or not, there is no denying that such a network would be a game changer for China, especially the internal provinces that haven’t seen nearly the same amount of development as those close to the shoreline. Given the flat-out ludicrous amounts of commodities still to be exploited in Central Asia, it might also be a game changer for the various -stan countries.
It’s useful to view their activities from the political perspective as opposed to the economical. Just as social security was not instituted in the name of economic efficiency, neither are the rails going to be built for that purpose. The purpose is to solidify Chinas influence.