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I was in Hong Kong recently. My girlfriend is doing a postdoc there, so I expect to be there frequently. Two things struck me. 1. China just opened one of the

• hyperbovine 8y ago
  Totalitarian governments have a long history of “getting shit done”, as you put it. This is not new. Fewer megabridges is but one of the many prices you pay in return for freedom of expression. By the way, who do you think is most excited about being able to drive a bunch of shit into HK from mainland China on a monent’s notice?
  • Rylinks 8y ago
    why? I do think there is a historical case, but what about freedom of expression makes it harder to build bridges, and is there a way to build bridges anyway?
    • simonh 8y ago
      Just look at the political back and forth about new terminals at Heathrow. The public inquiries, consultations and local election battles have been going on for decades. Hardly an infrastructure project goes by without it being challenged in court by environmental and local interest groups. Democratic governments also have to publish detailed budgets and face electoral pressure on spending priorities. More infrastructure equals fewer hospital beds is a powerful political argument, it might be answerable but at least it has to be addressed. The Three Gorges Dam wiped out 13 cities, 140 towns and 1350 villages and dislocated 1.24 million residents. There were probably protests, but how would you know and what do you think happened to the protesters? Here in Britain we're having a permanent crisis building one more airport terminal. Autocratic regimes are completely opaque in their finances and budgetary priorities and care more about publicly visible results, of which flagship infrastructure projects are a prominent part.
    • thrower123 8y ago
      I'm not sure freedom of expression is the main component; freedom from being rounded up into re-education camps or having everything you possess taken from you for the greater good if I say frog and you don't jump fast enough. When you have such a complete monopoly on force and authority, you can tell people to build bridges or else; hell, you can chase crackpot economic development ideas that starve tens of millions of your own people to death if you want.
    • pesmhey 8y ago
      Figuratively, being free to express, “I don’t want to do this.”
  • imgabe 8y ago
    If this is the trade-off that Western democracies are going to force on their citizens, then frankly they're going to lose. Because guess what: # of times in the average person's day when it is useful to be able to Google Tienneman Square: ~0 # of times when functioning public infrastructure is useful: All day every day. So shrugging your shoulders and saying "whelp, that's the price you pay for freedom of expression" is not a good enough answer. Sooner or later people are going to decide the price isn't worth it if their government isnt capable of doing anything that actually benefits them
    • sho 8y ago
      You're being downvoted, probably for the flip Tiananmen Square reference, but I think there's a lot of truth to it. The Chinese are not dumb - they know a lot of bad stuff went down back in the day, and they're not supposed to ask too many questions, and for the most part they shrug and get on with their day. I'd say the attitude is like what most Americans might think about the Kent State "incident". Yes, it was horrible, but it was so long ago and nothing like that could ever happen again. And frankly it couldn't, the bloody PLA are not going to run over students in tanks in broad daylight being streamed live in HD around the world by every drone in Beijing. That said, there's a lot of fear in China about how long the government can keep the house of cards standing. The CCP derives its legitimacy from its successes - if things really start to go badly, there could be internal strife well beyond anything imaginable in the west. Their attempt to totally control information is really an indicator of weakness and paranoia, not strength. One would hope that if they can actually navigate the coming storms and build a genuinely healthy economy, the need for all that will gradually diminish. Of course, if they can't... well, I can see how being able to technologically inhibit massive rioting might be an appealing tool in the belt.
  • mandelken 8y ago
    You are mistaken, freedom of expression in Hong Kong is on par with what you have in US or Europe. From my own experience, the media is even more independent than in Europe/US and definitely less of a police state than some parts in the US. Remember Snowden moved to Hong Kong to get his story out.
    • prolikewh0a 8y ago
      I watch a lot of youtube videos from China from people interested in electronics. They're always out and about, shopping, having a great time. It's not the greatest source but it shows me it's really not this total crumbling s&+thole western media makes it out to be. The internet makes China out to be this place where everyone is just always working, have almost no rights anymore, constantly surveiled so they can't have fun or enjoyment, just NPC's making womens underwear for 2 cents an hour. I think it's just projection from the failures of their own country to be honest.
      • vackosar 8y ago
        could they be faking the lifestyle?
      • hyperbovine 8y ago
        That is a complete red herring. No one on this thread said any of those things. I think the media and internet portrayal of China these days is fairly accurate: a country filled gleaming new cities and hordes of well-off people, and also one in which you can get executed for stealing, disappeared for practicing the wrong religion, and tortured (or worse) for speaking out against the government. Also the fact that you seem to equate shopping with freedom strikes me as very American :-)
    • rtpg 8y ago
      eh, to my knowledge the US gov't hasn't been kidnapping many booksellers in the past decade. And despite a bunch of nasty undemocratic stuff happening in the US, there were a lot of underhanded things going on in recent political events in HK. If Snowden was in HK with Chinese state intelligence (or more likely, details about party leadership scandals), he would not have been able to leave the country unscathed.
• simonh 8y ago
  Hong Kong is independent of the mainland government and is self-governing so I don't see how you can give credit for it's subway system to Beijing which has had nothing to do with it. They were more involved in the bridge, but mainly in terms of permission and financing, the project was conceived and driven by a private firm based in Hong Kong and later the Hong Kong legislature.
• baybal2 8y ago
  > China is getting shit done and building things That's the bottom line. It frightens me to admit, but China is the only advanced economy where progress is happening these days. If you check out the opinion of Western expat population here (other than English teachers and ayis) a high double digit of them will put out this very concrete reasoning for coming here. Most come here because they are betting on a winning horse, not because they suddenly felt in love papa Xi or anything. The scorecards of Western nations stopped improving two decades ago, and I believe we are now passing an inflection point from which their stagnation turns into a decline.
  • rounce 8y ago
    How exactly are these score cards tallied?
• nestorD 8y ago
  Vox has some very good videos on Hong Kong and one in particular on China's current approach to the integration of the city : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQyxG4vTyZ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQyxG4vTyZ8
• vfulco2 8y ago
  Spend any time in HK taxis with a driver who quickly trusts you (a foreigner) and the phrase "never forget" comes to mind. They are afraid.
• rtpg 8y ago
  Venture out of Hong Kong and Shanghai and you will easily find busted up stuff. Even relatively deep in the countryside you will have new roads, so the infrastructure is spread out nicely. But in so many places you will find abandoned buildings, 80% empty new construction trying to capitalise on a huge real estate bubble, and some major overprovisioning (things are growing fast, but not that fast). So many places just feel empty. A lot of it reminds me of the nightmarish city designs of le corbusier, where design decisions were taken to look the most impressive on a postcard, or to look huge from a postcard. But then you're walking inside the place and it feels totally out of place. It's great that infrastructure is being built, and this sort of mass movement could help tackle a lot of problems. But like Moses' highways in the past, these are being built more as political monuments rather than as smart urbanism. No politician wants to be in charge of building 3 normal-speed train line when they could be in charge of building a high-speed train line, even if the former would be more useful.
• NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  The Bridge is a political statement, nothing more. Few will use it, not least due to the complexity and political approval required for permits from 3 different authorities. The Hong Kong subway was designed and built during Hong Kong's time under British administration, and built as a public programme under the HK Council. It would have been far larger but for the oil crisis, but expanded a dozen times between then and now, even after privatisation in 2000. Broadly in line with HK's development, and in a way that would have been difficult to replicate back in the UK. The governance that makes HK such a success was nothing to do with Beijing. That was the whole point of the initial emphasis on two systems during handover. Since the 1997 handover Beijing has progressively weakened and interfered with HK, to barely a peep from the West, not even Britain. Only this week there's been reports of the last truly free bookshop (where one might find anything critical of Beijing), once a vibrant aspect of HK, has closed thanks to Beijing pressure. You might have heard the recent reports of the kidnappings of booksellers and publishers. Hong Kong was a special, free, window into China until the early 2010's. Please don't give Beijing any credit for it.
  • imgabe 8y ago
    Ok, fair enough. I have been to mainland China as well, and the infrastructure there is equally impressive. Whether it's HK or Beijing, there is some fundamental difference between them and the US and other Western countries that seems to make it possible to build public infrastructure there but not here. We need to figure out what it is and fix it, because whatever the US is doing it's not working compared to China and HK. I live in the capital of the supposedly most powerful country in the world and the basic mechanics of getting from point A to point B are an embarrassment. Look at the difference between these political statements. One is a tangible object: one of the longest bridges in the world that people could actually use to do something faster than they did before. The "political statement" from western leaders is a quote in an article in a journal that only policy wonks read. I wonder which will have more impact?
    • semperdark 8y ago
      China uses infrastructure spending to stimulate the economy, at the expense of enormous amounts of debt. A lot of this spending goes to essentially unproductive construction, like building subway systems larger than NYC's in small cities. It remains to be seen whether this will pay off, but they were significantly cutting back on spending before the tariffs started.
• AlgorithmicTime 8y ago
  And we built the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel in 1964 and expanded it in 1999. What of it?