- cross-posted to:
- fuckcars@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- fuckcars@lemmy.world
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What’s up with all the China hype on Lemmy? These projects are impressive, no doubt, but their cost in terms of human rights violations are pretty high. I’m speaking generally, I don’t have the specifics with regards to this subway system. Either way it’s not really comparable to a project like this in a country like Canada imo.
Some countries want to sell the image of “China is the absolute evil”, thus from this logic everything “good” must equal something very evil.
Some of those are valid, some are stupid as hell.
For the covid ones - the cost was complete lockdown, with some people’s doors being welded shut (not official government policy, but common enough to make news, as lower level authorities get some decision making power in these cases). Imagine having an emergency and your door being welded shut. And of course we later found out that even multi-dose vaccines don’t stop covid 100%, so instead of stopping the pandemic forever, nothing of value was actually achieved. Covid is the new seasonal flu. For a while we didn’t even get vaccines for Covid here in Estonia anymore, though now they’re back on the table, free if you’re in a high risk group.
Electric cars - the cost is mass government subsidies for BYD and a couple of others. BYD doesn’t make money if they sell you a car I believe, they make money from the Chinese government if they sell you a car. Even if you’re in another country. China wants their EVs to dominate the market and that’s a strategy. This is why the EU had to raise tariffs on Chinese cars. Otherwise the European auto industry would simply die.
Electric cars - the cost is mass government subsidies for BYD and a couple of others. BYD doesn’t make money if they sell you a car I believe, they make money from the Chinese government if they sell you a car. Even if you’re in another country. China wants their EVs to dominate the market and that’s a strategy. This is why the EU had to raise tariffs on Chinese cars. Otherwise the European auto industry would simply die.
Why doesn’t the EU simply also subsidize their EVs?
They’re for-profit companies and so far pretty successful without direct subsidies. EU countries usually have subsidies for purchasing EVs (regardless of manufacturer) rather than subsidizing the manufacturers directly - this leaves the consumers more choice and has a similar or maybe even better effect on EV adoption. On the climate side of things as well as public health and equal opportunities for people, transit investments would be better than outright paying BMW and Mercedes to make their EVs cheaper. China, however, doesn’t just want EV adoption on their own roads, China wants THEIR EVs specifically to dominate the world. Usually this is seen as unfair, regardless of industry, and is one of the few valid reasons for tariffs in an otherwise free global market.
The funny thing is, if the Chinese subsidize their EVs and the EU tariffs them, the tariff money could then be spent on EV subsidies - bringing all the different manufacturers to equal ground again.
yeah this makes sense to me
i guess there is a lot of ways to subsidize something. for example, if you want your local EV company to produce cheaper EVs, you could also subsidize public housing sothat rent is cheaper, sothat workers have cheaper rent and don’t need to ask for such high wages to cover the cost of living.
Lots of things, yeah. Many countries have set up energy efficiency loans too - for home renovations, or for business purposes. The idea is that you give out low interest loans so people (or companies) can achieve what they need earlier. I don’t know if anything like that is in place in Germany, France or Sweden (or Italy, I suppose they still have a bit of their car industry left), but if I was in a relevant position in one of those companies and there was a need to, say, build a battery manufacturing plant locally so that EVs could be built for cheaper and less dependence on existing battery manufacturers, I’d definitely go ask the relevant nation’s government, parliament and/or business development department, for a loan, tax break, or subsidies. Worst that could happen is they say no.
But yeah, an already successful car manufacturer getting straight on subsidies for selling cars they’re already making and selling anyway - extremely unlikely in most countries I’d think. Now if one or two of the German big 3 were on the verge of bankruptcy because of Chinese competition, that might change. Still sounds unlikely though. China’s GDP is 4x that of Germany’s, they can afford to keep subsidizing their shit for longer.
We don’t have to agree with China’s politics to appreciate that they did a positive thing. And we shouldn’t have to emulate their politics to get a thing done. We should be able to do it
Pentagon wasted tax money on facebook bots to convince people in East Asia that the chinese covid vaccine was poison, so no one is really buying the “China human rights abuses are what allow China to succeed” idea anymore.
Especially since you can just as easily point to Japan’s infrastructure projects which achieved the same thing under US supervision post WWII, meaning said human rights violations aren’t even a supposed cost if there’s less evidence of it that of UAE literally pirating in immigrants to build their lavish towers and stadiums.
Of which the US fully supports, so this just goes back to the blame game of who is worse.
Yes, China has some shady ideas of what is considered acceptable behavior and work output from citizens, but the point is that they are using it to rapidly grow their infrastructure, unlike NA which take a decade for a single transit system to get approved all while car OEMs are pumping out dumpsterfire vehicles of whose parts are overwhelmingly made in China.
All jokes aside, things like this are why China is beating us. I am absolutely not a fan of the Chinese government, but the simple fact is they get shit done.
It helps that in China you can’t own land. All the land is owned by the government. You only have “use rights” and for a limited time (something like 80 years - I forget the exact number). So when it comes time to build infrastructure the government just tells you to gtfo.
America is no different. Try not paying your land tax.
The only difference is that, in America, someone needs to shout “eminent domain!” first and slip you $500 for your house.
Isn’t this post about Canada?
Look to public transit development in Taiwan as an example of how to do it right in a democratic nation. There are still loads of problems but the Taiwanese government can’t just take your land outright. Taipei especially has seen phenomenal growth in its metro development in the last 20 years.
The government of Taiwan is the Chinese government
Just like how Pakistan administers Jammu & Kashmir and India administers AJK & Gilgit Baltistan, both of which are across the Line of Control in the opposite country’s border lol.
China has stronger property laws than the US, look up stuck nail houses. If the US wants your property, they can eminent domain your shit. In China, developers have literally had to swerve highways around property or build shopping centers around that one person who wont sell
Lies. My family had a factory in Wuxi, China. 2 buildings that were dedicated to dormitories. 4 buildings dedicated to manufacturing promotional products.
We were able to lease the land for 50 years with a 50-year option at the end of the term.
Around year 5, the government decided to turn the main dirt road into a proper road. They took back 1/4 of the land. They just used our area for staging.
About a year after the road was made, they decided to expand the road. They took back now 1/2 of the original land and buildings.
Less than a year after the expansion, they turned the 4 lane road i to a highway. They took the entire land back. My family invested millions of dollars in buildings and infrastructure. We got back pennies on the dollar spent on the investment on compensation.
My family never fully recovered financially.
And China has slave labor
Proof or I don’t believe.
I mean so does the United States thanks to the 13th amendment but we don’t have anywhere near the same infrastructure to show for it
I don’t care about the post itself, but OP, in the last 24 hours you’ve made something like 80 posts. What the fuck?
I guess it’s easier to undertake a massive infrastructure project if you can just tell residents to move it or else…
The idea that you get to put a stake in the ground and then that plot of dirt yours forever is insane. The amount of infrastructure projects in Denmark that are put on hold indefinitely because locals are upset, not at being forced to move, but because they think they own their land and the view, is nuts.
I agree. There needs to be a middle ground. In Germany, NIMBYs opposed to wind turbines because they’re supposedly loud and ugly, as well as NIMBYs opposed to high-capacity power lines have become somewhat of a meme.
The right way to handle this is buying the land at a reasonable price (where you actually need to build on someone’s land, not buying ‘the view’).
I’ve heard people around me saying they make people sick. By spinning, I guess?
For the same reason as WiFi supposedly making people sick.
To be clear, what I mean by that is “its utter horse shit”.
WiFi at least does go through you. It’s harmless, even if it was four orders of magnitude more powerful it’d just cause heating, but there’s contact.
If I had to think of a reason a windmill could cause illness, I’d guess infrasound, but the the proponents seem to think it’s something about the way they reflect sunlight. It reminds me of when people in England though the first trains were making their cows sick, it’s like real bumpkin stuff.
Talking about China’s human rights issues right away is very strange. Nobody does this if someone mentions a US project.
I wonder why
Because the US has no human rights violations?
/s
I might be wrong but a lot of it’s wikipedia page looks like this city was completely reconstructed from the ground up in said period of time that makes it too exceptional for this comparison and not a usual occurence even in China. It became a major hub of China-EU trade upping it’s importance and neccesitating a boost in infrastructural efficiency while it’s population effectively doubled. A great move all around tho.
Is this another bot that all hails great mother china? They use people like disposable biomass when building this crap.
Here is an analysis on construction related fatalities in China.
And here is some reporting construction related fatalities in the US
Population: Chengdu over 20 million vs. under 3 million in Toronto.
The maps above also seem to be differently scaled.
Also, the fact that it has technologically developed fast in the past decades, as compared to Canada that has developed steadily in the past century, is not really the gotcha OP seems to imply it is.
That said, it’s perfectly possible that public transport in Toronto leaves much to be desired - without comparing it to Chengdu.
Don’t forget Chinese corner cutting. You probably have to knock 25% off of that if you want infrastructure of a level of quality and safety tolerable to Westerners.
I think it’s fair to guess China is less car-obsessed than Canada, and more serious about fighting climate change. That being said, without cheating it becomes pretty obvious we’re working with the same technology and fundamental logistics in this map.
what do you mean “knock 25% off of that” (off what?) and “without cheating it becomes pretty obvious we’re working with the same technology and fundamental logistics in this map”? sorry i’m just struggling to parse this
Off of the remaining size of the Chengdu network after you correct for the other issues in OP’s representation.
Regardless of the ethnicity and mother tongue of the workers, smelting and extruding rebar, shipping it and pouring concrete around it is the same process. They can’t magically go faster over there, and the reason their labour seems cheaper on paper has to do with the West producing things they can’t (yet). If correctly presented, it would be pretty obvious it’s not apples-to-oranges like this comparison looks in OP, I think.
I am wondering WTF happened to Toronto line 3, though.
btw as mentioned below, line 3 was cut to make way for replacing it with a line 2 extension
Yeah, the Wikipedia article is pretty long and I can’t really make out what’s going on easily. Did they not have funding to maintain both?
It was a tacked-on retrofit of a planned ambitious interurban streetcar network, converted to a light rail system after a lot of it was already built. The trains don’t even use some of the built track. This used technology that was completely different from the rest of the network and only found there within all of Toronto. The sharp corners the cars weren’t particularly designed for effected loud shrieking guitarless metal heard far and wide, loud and clear at the Kennedy bus platforms. When it came time to decide the future of the line, the planners decided to blow it up and start it anew (well, turn it into a three-station extension to Line 2); among other things, all of the above plus relatively low usage and decades of inattention prior to the “what now?” discussions made their usual maintenance unprepared and inadept. In fact, just four months before the planned closure, a train derailed due to failures of track maintenance.
If you’re into 15-minute videos, try this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvwmiSU7zLY&pp=ygUQbGluZSAzIHJtdHJhbnNpdA%3D%3D
Chengdu is the capital city of the Chinese province of Sichuan. With a population of 20,937,757 at the 2020 census.
Toronto is the most populous city in Canada and the capital city of the Canadian province of Ontario. With a population of 2,794,356 in 2021
Meanwhile Hamburg, Germany with only 1.8 Million:
lol, as if it’s all magic?
Does the sinkhole caused by slapdash construction feature on the map?
How about the shed where 4 people died during construction?
https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202109/11/WS613ba6e7a310efa1bd66ebdc.html
We have had industrial accidents and deaths as well… We may have better safety standards but going from no subway system to a massive full city system more robust than Western countries in a fraction of the time is pretty remarkable.
