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What an incredible achievement. Every time I see China's engineering marvels, or any visible statistics of its progress, I feel a slight tinge sadness as an Ind

What an incredible achievement. Every time I see China's engineering marvels, or any visible statistics of its progress, I feel a slight tinge sadness as an Indian citizen. In India, such feats are few and far between and if you account the time taken to complete them, the scenario is even more depressing. Chenab bridge, touted as soon-to-be world's tallest railway bridge, for instance, was scheduled to completed by 2009. Work halted due to safety concerns, but began again an year later. The date was, then, shifted to 2015 and now, the newer estimate suggest it will be completed by 2019 [1]. I am not sure if we'll be able to abide by that too. Democracy might give people something to cheer about, but, for a country fraught with inefficiencies, it does make progress awfully slow. [1]: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/transportation/railways/worlds-highest-railway-bridge-to-come-up-over-chenab-by-2019/taller-than-eiffel-tower/slideshow/58573206.cms http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/transportation/...

melling 9y ago
I'm an American and I understand too. We are living through the decades where America gave away its leadership in the world. We can't get anything accomplished at a reasonable price in reasonable time. For example, China built 14,000 miles of high-speed rail in about 15 years, with another 10,000 on the way. In America we still haven't built our first line. Every time the discussion comes up, it degenerates into people explaining all the places it won't work. Not to worry for India, in 50 years it will be better off than today. It might even pass the US.
- jhayward 9y ago
  > I'm an American and I understand too. We are living through the decades where America gave away its leadership in the world. We can't get anything accomplished at a reasonable price in reasonable time It's not that we can't get it accomplished reasonably, you'd be amazed at how fast and cheaply major projects can be developed if funding is properly structured. It's rather that we've wasted our treasure on other things. Jack Ma had an interesting comment at Davos[1] - what would the US be like if we had spent the $14 trillion we've wasted on war and wall street bailouts on infrastructure, research, and education in the Midwest? [1] http://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/18/chinese-billionaire-jack-ma-says-the-us-wasted-trillions-on-warfare-instead-of-investing-in-infrastructure.html http://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/18/chinese-billionaire-jack-ma-s...
  - idibidiart 9y ago
    I don't think Iraq or Afghanistan got those $14 trillion. Iraqi infrastructure is worse than it was under Saddam, and society is much poorer... and in civil war. The money went to friends of corrupt US administrations and military contractors. That is 14,000 billion dollars stolen from American workers and shoved into the pockets of filthy rich white men.
  - sosa2k 9y ago
    Wall Street bailouts were necessary to keep our country and economy intact. Most if not all of the money has been paid back. Agree on the war part though, it sucks that we spent so much on it.
    - atonse 9y ago
      And this will never change. I live in the DC area and when you live here, you see how much of our economy in America is dependent on our ability to continue fighting wars. The military industrial complex is so out of control and bloated, we can't help but keep fighting wars to feed all these thousands of jobs going. Very worrying state of affairs.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
    - honestoHeminway 9y ago
      Is it intact? Or did the money blisters just move?
  - twoodfin 9y ago
    $14T is an absurd exaggeration of the budgetary costs of post-9/11 wars and post-2008 bailouts. The entire Iraq war/post-war cost $800B, most of the TARP bailout money was paid back. You can claim there were huge knock-on costs to the economy for either if you like, but skipping either or both would not have given the US Government trillions to spend on Midwestern infrastructure.
- mistermann 9y ago
  > America gave away its leadership in the world More specifically, CEO's of American corporations with a time horizon of at most 5 years.
- orthoganol 9y ago
  It's also a problem that our culture is so damn obsessed with cars, which we have in part to thank the auto industry shoving itself down consumers throats, lobbying, and running into the dirt other viable modes of transportation for almost a century. I'd take sophisticated, public transportation and efficient inter regional lines any day over American Car Culture. I just don't think you can lament the state of inter regional transportation in the US without talking about our country's very unique obsession and history with the auto industry.
discordianfish 9y ago
I'm from Germany, often considered the country of quality engineering and just look at our airport: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Brandenburg_Airport#Delayed_opening_and_construction_flaws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Brandenburg_Airport#Del... tl;dr: Planned to open in 2011, it's still in construction with some say it won't open before 2020.
- losteric 9y ago
  It seemed like the project was started with unclear/unvetted requirements, led by bureaucracy and image instead of engineering. China tends to do things the other way around. That smoke exhaust system seems absurd - I don't know how the architectural plans even left the design phase. It should have been isolated and designed such that it could be replaced with a conventional approach cheaply. The rest of the project sounds like a deadline-driven fixed-resource software project with incompetent management - hacks and cut corners everywhere.
  - tormeh 9y ago
    Unfortunately infrastructure bureaucrats aren't as forgiving as software customers...
- diggan 9y ago
  Heh, funny but not that long time (started in 2006, planned to be finished by 2020), while Sagrada Familia (here in Barcelona) started at 1882 and after stopping/starting/stopping forever, it's not estimated to be finished by 2026–2028 (so about 140 years, if accurate). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagrada_Fam%C3%ADlia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagrada_Fam%C3%ADlia
  - oh_sigh 9y ago
    That's not too bad. A lot of old cathedrals would take multiple generations to build...Notre Dame for example took over 200 years to build.
jjcc 9y ago
Maybe it's more likely a competition between 2 different democracies as opposed to authoritarian vs democracy which main stream media often sell to public. Let me explain. Contrary to most western audience's belief, Democracy is also a value promoted by CPP , at least literally. But the meaning of democracy is quite different. The one in India focus on equal voting from everybody , in China such practice is only gradually implemented in some area recently, but what CPP emphasize more is collective decision making by a group of participants not a dominant chief officer. As to select policy maker/politician , Chinese system evolved to a very different systematic procedure with some democracy factors (i.e. selected by vote, but not by average people). See a TED speech: https://www.ted.com/talks/eric_x_li_a_tale_of_two_political_systems#t-262767 https://www.ted.com/talks/eric_x_li_a_tale_of_two_political_... The consequence of the difference is "democratically elected" policy makers are good story tellers finally win the voters . Usually they are former Lawyer, Journalist who are very good at articulating and performing to gain higher votes, live in their own alternative reality sometime lead to war. As a comparison, typical Chinese officials are usually not so good looking , even can not speak fluently without a speech note, more likely trained as engineers with better understanding facts , less influenced by ideology. But they are in that position for a better reason: They have some track record of accomplishment. From Machine learning point of view, India democracy looks like a simple one layer Perceptron with equal weights on all inputs, Chinese "democracy" is a forward feed neural network with a very small hidden layer with the weights somehow adjusted. Good luck to India people.
- slackingoff2017 9y ago
  The CPP is a one party system and anything but Democratic. To dissent or attempt to form another political party is illegal. Whether the election process within the CPP is Democratic doesn't matter, the vast majority of citizens have no vote. China is a classic communist dictatorship with a few Democratic elements.
  - nabla9 9y ago
    China is de facto aristocratic class system. You have 80 million strong communist 'noble' families. Well performing people from lower class can get 'the title' and become part of ruling class, but mostly the status is inherited. China actually has several other parties than Communist party, for example Chinese Kuomintang, China Democratic League etc. But they are small meritocratic ally selected (only 100,000 members and must be intellectual) support parties. Communist party still rules. In principle people outside the system can be elected. If I remember only one person has been able to get trough in 20 years and all independent candidates are harassed ruthlessly.
Camillo 9y ago
I've often wondered about India's remarkable lack of progress compared to China. I would be interested in reading more about the causes.

melling 9y ago

I'm an American and I understand too. We are living through the decades where America gave away its leadership in the world. We can't get anything accomplished at a reasonable price in reasonable time. For example, China built 14,000 miles of high-speed rail in about 15 years, with another 10,000 on the way. In America we still haven't built our first line. Every time the discussion comes up, it degenerates into people explaining all the places it won't work. Not to worry for India, in 50 years it will be better off than today. It might even pass the US.

jhayward 9y ago
> I'm an American and I understand too. We are living through the decades where America gave away its leadership in the world. We can't get anything accomplished at a reasonable price in reasonable time It's not that we can't get it accomplished reasonably, you'd be amazed at how fast and cheaply major projects can be developed if funding is properly structured. It's rather that we've wasted our treasure on other things. Jack Ma had an interesting comment at Davos[1] - what would the US be like if we had spent the $14 trillion we've wasted on war and wall street bailouts on infrastructure, research, and education in the Midwest? [1] http://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/18/chinese-billionaire-jack-ma-says-the-us-wasted-trillions-on-warfare-instead-of-investing-in-infrastructure.html http://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/18/chinese-billionaire-jack-ma-s...
- idibidiart 9y ago
  I don't think Iraq or Afghanistan got those $14 trillion. Iraqi infrastructure is worse than it was under Saddam, and society is much poorer... and in civil war. The money went to friends of corrupt US administrations and military contractors. That is 14,000 billion dollars stolen from American workers and shoved into the pockets of filthy rich white men.
- sosa2k 9y ago
  Wall Street bailouts were necessary to keep our country and economy intact. Most if not all of the money has been paid back. Agree on the war part though, it sucks that we spent so much on it.
  - atonse 9y ago
    And this will never change. I live in the DC area and when you live here, you see how much of our economy in America is dependent on our ability to continue fighting wars. The military industrial complex is so out of control and bloated, we can't help but keep fighting wars to feed all these thousands of jobs going. Very worrying state of affairs.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - honestoHeminway 9y ago
    Is it intact? Or did the money blisters just move?
- twoodfin 9y ago
  $14T is an absurd exaggeration of the budgetary costs of post-9/11 wars and post-2008 bailouts. The entire Iraq war/post-war cost $800B, most of the TARP bailout money was paid back. You can claim there were huge knock-on costs to the economy for either if you like, but skipping either or both would not have given the US Government trillions to spend on Midwestern infrastructure.
mistermann 9y ago
> America gave away its leadership in the world More specifically, CEO's of American corporations with a time horizon of at most 5 years.
orthoganol 9y ago
It's also a problem that our culture is so damn obsessed with cars, which we have in part to thank the auto industry shoving itself down consumers throats, lobbying, and running into the dirt other viable modes of transportation for almost a century. I'd take sophisticated, public transportation and efficient inter regional lines any day over American Car Culture. I just don't think you can lament the state of inter regional transportation in the US without talking about our country's very unique obsession and history with the auto industry.

discordianfish 9y ago

I'm from Germany, often considered the country of quality engineering and just look at our airport: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Brandenburg_Airport#Delayed_opening_and_construction_flaws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Brandenburg_Airport#Del... tl;dr: Planned to open in 2011, it's still in construction with some say it won't open before 2020.

losteric 9y ago
It seemed like the project was started with unclear/unvetted requirements, led by bureaucracy and image instead of engineering. China tends to do things the other way around. That smoke exhaust system seems absurd - I don't know how the architectural plans even left the design phase. It should have been isolated and designed such that it could be replaced with a conventional approach cheaply. The rest of the project sounds like a deadline-driven fixed-resource software project with incompetent management - hacks and cut corners everywhere.
- tormeh 9y ago
  Unfortunately infrastructure bureaucrats aren't as forgiving as software customers...
diggan 9y ago
Heh, funny but not that long time (started in 2006, planned to be finished by 2020), while Sagrada Familia (here in Barcelona) started at 1882 and after stopping/starting/stopping forever, it's not estimated to be finished by 2026–2028 (so about 140 years, if accurate). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagrada_Fam%C3%ADlia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagrada_Fam%C3%ADlia
- oh_sigh 9y ago
  That's not too bad. A lot of old cathedrals would take multiple generations to build...Notre Dame for example took over 200 years to build.

jjcc 9y ago

Maybe it's more likely a competition between 2 different democracies as opposed to authoritarian vs democracy which main stream media often sell to public. Let me explain. Contrary to most western audience's belief, Democracy is also a value promoted by CPP , at least literally. But the meaning of democracy is quite different. The one in India focus on equal voting from everybody , in China such practice is only gradually implemented in some area recently, but what CPP emphasize more is collective decision making by a group of participants not a dominant chief officer. As to select policy maker/politician , Chinese system evolved to a very different systematic procedure with some democracy factors (i.e. selected by vote, but not by average people). See a TED speech: https://www.ted.com/talks/eric_x_li_a_tale_of_two_political_systems#t-262767 https://www.ted.com/talks/eric_x_li_a_tale_of_two_political_... The consequence of the difference is "democratically elected" policy makers are good story tellers finally win the voters . Usually they are former Lawyer, Journalist who are very good at articulating and performing to gain higher votes, live in their own alternative reality sometime lead to war. As a comparison, typical Chinese officials are usually not so good looking , even can not speak fluently without a speech note, more likely trained as engineers with better understanding facts , less influenced by ideology. But they are in that position for a better reason: They have some track record of accomplishment. From Machine learning point of view, India democracy looks like a simple one layer Perceptron with equal weights on all inputs, Chinese "democracy" is a forward feed neural network with a very small hidden layer with the weights somehow adjusted. Good luck to India people.

slackingoff2017 9y ago
The CPP is a one party system and anything but Democratic. To dissent or attempt to form another political party is illegal. Whether the election process within the CPP is Democratic doesn't matter, the vast majority of citizens have no vote. China is a classic communist dictatorship with a few Democratic elements.
- nabla9 9y ago
  China is de facto aristocratic class system. You have 80 million strong communist 'noble' families. Well performing people from lower class can get 'the title' and become part of ruling class, but mostly the status is inherited. China actually has several other parties than Communist party, for example Chinese Kuomintang, China Democratic League etc. But they are small meritocratic ally selected (only 100,000 members and must be intellectual) support parties. Communist party still rules. In principle people outside the system can be elected. If I remember only one person has been able to get trough in 20 years and all independent candidates are harassed ruthlessly.

Camillo 9y ago

I've often wondered about India's remarkable lack of progress compared to China. I would be interested in reading more about the causes.