664
Literally communism.
This thing they call "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics" has as much in common with Marx and Engels' idea of Communism as a Big Mac has with a plate of hummus.
Edit: western dengists, man.
While this is true it is not because China has deviated from socialist theory, including that of Marx and Enfels. China is a dictatorship of the proletariat as described by Marx and Engels as the necessary precursor to communism. It is also taking a very specific strategy towards imperialism that involves special economic zones, or capitalism zones, in order to build productive forces while also coupling the well-being of imperialist countries to China's ability to produce.
Communism will never be achieved by a state and no state has ever expected to do so. The idea that any country ever could use a category error, it means a person doesn't understand the term at all as used by Marx a d Engels. It is, by definition, stateless, and could only happen after all states are eventually abolished. But again, being practical people, they expected this to happen through a long process of struggle with dictatorships of the proletariat being what socialists first formed and could use to overturn the capitalist order
My favorite trope has to be western leftists confidently talking nonsense about China.
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As someone who loves trains I find this truly impressive and I wish my country cared half as much about trains as China does
China's population density in its eastern half is an order of magnitude higher than pretty much every country, which really changes the transportation calculation. It'd be impossible for them to build enough roads to effectively transport their population around the country
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Seeing my country of residence change for the better during my lifetime is a completely alien concept to me.
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This is 6 years ago. Is there a more recent map?
Yes
May we see it?
No
:(
For a more detailed view at all rail infrastructure the transport layer on osm is nice: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=7/29.845/113.676&layers=T
All the dark black lines should be train lines. This shows all types tho, not just the high speed ones. But honestly for general commercial and social prosperity, the regional lines are probably more important than the high speed long distance ones. If you go over to Europe while using this layer, it will get very dense.
Edit: this ones is a bit more nuanced http://cnrail.geogv.org/enus/about
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.
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Banger thread on the other side of the defederation barrier.
Wbat's saddest of all is that the US is a one-party state in all the worst ways and a democracy in many of the wrong ways.
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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Since Lemmy.world friends can't see the Lemmygrad and Hexbear comments, it's really weird to see the pro-commie takes not get downvoted and debated to oblivion
It's also kind of funny, Lemmy.world gets to pretend their takes have the majority of support when they shut out dissent.
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Love trains
Have the new rail lines reduced automobile traffic? Or are they adding lines in anticipation of future traffic?
The PRC doesn't have an already-built-up car-focused infrastructure like the US does for example, so they get to do it right from scratch. It becomes very difficult to get rid of that once it's built, so its best to do it right from the start.
They're trying to account for current and future needs for city-to-city travel.
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Pure speculation on my part: The average Chinese citizen now has a higher standard of living, so the need for mobility increases. You'll have both more car owners and the need for railways, which does help reduce the need for cars, but they also don't fully overlap in use cases. You aren't just going from people swapping their car for taking a train, but also giving many people that had no car to start with the option to choose between getting one or using trains for their travels. Which is good, but in absolute numbers you still see more cars.
Similar to how China is adding both a massive amount of renewable energy and at the same time still building coal power plants, simply because the overall need for energy is still growing.
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this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2024
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