Not really, there's thousands of lines of rail going to areas that the government purposefully resettled in some of those ghost cities. Most of the cities ended up somewhat filled (though still lots of stuff went unfilled especially in the north east). Many places got high speed rail lines that were intentionally depopulated/undergoing resettlement programs only a few years later. The government doesn't approve of it either, local officials get prosecuted for unneeded construction constantly.
It's also not like the depopulated areas are gonna get a population boom any time soon either. Many of the rural residents were resettled because the ground was too poisoned to use for agriculture anymore.
Yep. Local overspending is a big problem. The ground being too poisoned to use comment is on the rural resettlement program. The number one reason for pressuring rural resettlement is environmental degradation of the land. Those rural areas at the same time are also more likely to get local overspending which will never be paid back as the area is never going to grow. If people want a book source on the topic, here's a recent Marxist analysis of the forces driving overproduction and environmental degradation in China, includes lots of translated documents and case studies:
Here's a source on the railways (this paper is on the potential for abandoned rail lines to be used for urban renewal projects which I'm skeptical of, but it has citations on the amount of abandoned track and the problems it causes): https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40864-020-00127-2
Here's another (though Bloomberg yuck) piece on the unneeded development of more high speed rail lines. It makes an interesting suggestion though on how to get the low patronage lines to have higher ridership.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-08-17/china-doesn-t-need-another-125-000-miles-of-high-speed-rail
The point is certainly to integrate those communities, but if no one uses the high speed rail already there then building more is just excess production that will not be used and be abandoned eventually. Same thing with the highways, the last round of one's built out aren't being used yet there are still proposals approved for more, at the same time as approvals for high speed rail in areas where there's no ridership to support it, both certainly don't need to be there. If we were in full communism whatever, but we're not and rail lines that don't get ridership will be abandoned and rot. Even in full communism, we shouldn't build stuff that's excessive use of resources. One recent example of the overbuilding is the Lhasa ring road. Lhasa is not growing much at all and has like 280 thousand people, it doesn't need a 12 lane 100km ring road. Yet a massive ring road got made that doesn't see much use.
The old track article yeah is more about some of the much older track, I just cited it for how much abandoned rail there is which as far as I know there's no statistics on the split between how old different amounts are. Better stat would be underused high speed track.
Not really, there's thousands of lines of rail going to areas that the government purposefully resettled in some of those ghost cities. Most of the cities ended up somewhat filled (though still lots of stuff went unfilled especially in the north east). Many places got high speed rail lines that were intentionally depopulated/undergoing resettlement programs only a few years later. The government doesn't approve of it either, local officials get prosecuted for unneeded construction constantly.
It's also not like the depopulated areas are gonna get a population boom any time soon either. Many of the rural residents were resettled because the ground was too poisoned to use for agriculture anymore.
ty comrade for the insight
source on any of this? this sounds like typical western concern trolling about planned economies.
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Yep. Local overspending is a big problem. The ground being too poisoned to use comment is on the rural resettlement program. The number one reason for pressuring rural resettlement is environmental degradation of the land. Those rural areas at the same time are also more likely to get local overspending which will never be paid back as the area is never going to grow. If people want a book source on the topic, here's a recent Marxist analysis of the forces driving overproduction and environmental degradation in China, includes lots of translated documents and case studies:
https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745341576/chinas-engine-of-environmental-collapse/
Here's a source on the railways (this paper is on the potential for abandoned rail lines to be used for urban renewal projects which I'm skeptical of, but it has citations on the amount of abandoned track and the problems it causes): https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40864-020-00127-2
Here's another (though Bloomberg yuck) piece on the unneeded development of more high speed rail lines. It makes an interesting suggestion though on how to get the low patronage lines to have higher ridership. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-08-17/china-doesn-t-need-another-125-000-miles-of-high-speed-rail
deleted by creator
The point is certainly to integrate those communities, but if no one uses the high speed rail already there then building more is just excess production that will not be used and be abandoned eventually. Same thing with the highways, the last round of one's built out aren't being used yet there are still proposals approved for more, at the same time as approvals for high speed rail in areas where there's no ridership to support it, both certainly don't need to be there. If we were in full communism whatever, but we're not and rail lines that don't get ridership will be abandoned and rot. Even in full communism, we shouldn't build stuff that's excessive use of resources. One recent example of the overbuilding is the Lhasa ring road. Lhasa is not growing much at all and has like 280 thousand people, it doesn't need a 12 lane 100km ring road. Yet a massive ring road got made that doesn't see much use.
The old track article yeah is more about some of the much older track, I just cited it for how much abandoned rail there is which as far as I know there's no statistics on the split between how old different amounts are. Better stat would be underused high speed track.