I can't imagine there's much value in the US for this, considering we have fairly low tourism to China (and getting the visa was a miserable process, personally) and fewer still would be interested in taking train since we don't have that sort of culture here.
By contrast, Chinese tourism is a huge industry and high speed rail is quite normalized in China.
Given how overbooked the port of LA is (to the point where Chinese sea-vessels are going to the _EAST_ coast in hopes of actually delivering their payloads), freight rail between China and the USA is an obvious benefit to both countries.
So your thought is that the rail line will be done before the COVID induced delays? And, in the future that a railroad is going to be less prone to backups caused by delays unloading than ships that can just anchor offshore?
The back and forth capacity isn't the issue (look, they can even ship to the east coast). It's the capacity in the US to unload (and the capacity in China to load) that are being strained.
> So your thought is that the rail line will be done before the COVID induced delays?
Is COVID19 the only strain we'd see on shipping infrastructure that we'd have over the next 50 to 100 years of China-US trade?
If further stresses are to come out in the decades to come, it makes simple sense to invest into more infrastructure. Now, I don't know if rail is necessarily the best path forward, but its a strange one that's at least worth discussing.
> It's the capacity in the US to unload (and the capacity in China to load) that are being strained.
And an additional unloading spot somewhere else would alleviate the amount of work the LA port has to do.
>I think the port thing is destined to wind down. Mostly this is a temporary fluke - unless climate change or other factors diminish what ports can do.
My understanding is that California has passed laws that have highly discouraged in-state trucking investment, as many older vehicles became unable to be driven in 2020, and entire classes of engines being banned by 2035.
Ports in other states will have to take up the slack.
The alternative under consideration is a freight rail line. Presumably you could build railroads to the ports without needing to use more trucks in LA? Bear in mind that the US does not currently have any freight rail connections to Alaska!
>A belief at the beginning of the 1900s that trade expansion was shifting from Atlantic to Pacific destinations, and the benefit of being closer to Asia than existing west coast ports, proved wishful. Reduced transit times to eastern North America and Europe did not outweigh the fact that rail transport has always been far more expensive than by sea. The opening of the Panama Canal in 1914 exacerbated the problem.
While it's possible, high speed rail is generally designed primarily for passenger traffic[0] (although freight traffic can run on them at lower speeds iirc)
China is a hostile communist nation that has been waging an economic cold war against the USA for decades. The only benefit from the US is a full divorce from any form of economic dependence on China, and anything that facilities shipping more Chinese shit into the USA is a huge net negative.
Just consider the opportunity - this is a people moving system, not a stuff moving system. By increasing the exposure of Chinese people to information about their government, outside the reach of the CCP, Americans have the opportunity to educate. Violent revolution may be impossible without horrendous human cost, but the erosion of ccp power could lead to a gradual revolution and peaceful transition to something more liberal and democratic, or at least less imperial and aggressive.
We considered the opportunity back when Nixon opened relations with China. Now's the time to consider that the increasing exposure to China plan has blown up in our faces.
Hundreds of thousands of upper middle class Chinese tourists go through the US each summer. In Yellowstone the tourist attractions and shops often include Chinese signage and culturally relevant products.
A subset of those tourists are notorious for causing damage in national parks, misbehavior with animals, and leaving trash everywhere. One of the more recent incidents involved a Chinese family bathing their dogs in the thermal springs in Yellowstone, ignoring the signage warning that the ground off the boardwalks is nothing more than a crust of dried mud with scalding hot water below. The majority tend to be respectful, but there's a growing resentment against the bad behaviors of the few that translates into tension and prejudice.
Anyway, if imagine that such a train system would be a good thing, making the transport of tourists both ways more economical, and forcing both countries to adjust culturally. Personally, I've spoken out against China in public to the extent that I would be denied entry, but I love that Americans have the opportunity to engage with the Chinese people outside the bounds of their government's control. More of that can't help but be a good thing.
I am skeptical that this will ever come to pass. It seems like a huge outlay (likely higher than expected) in resources for an unclear benefit. My best guess is this is primarily a PR generator.
I agree it'd be awesome tho; I just don't see it happening.
Electric trains instead of polluting ships for freight? I think the value should be quite obvious. Plus, goods can be delivered in days as opposed to weeks. I am not sure why the article was pushing the passenger angle so much.
Trains do not deliver goods in days. Domestically, intermodal freight (primarily by train, bookended by local trucks) takes 1-2 weeks to deliver, usually closer to 2, and sometimes 3 if there is congestion.
Before the major port congestion, Ningbo-LA/Tacoma was usually 2-3 weeks.
Big ocean carriers are very, very efficient carriers of goods. If we don't like the fuel they burn (agreed) we should make them burn cleaner diesel, because it'll still be vastly cheaper and less polluting then building thousands of miles of high capacity train routes through sensitive ecological areas.
Not sure which countries will pay, but the article notes this undersea train network would also connect with Canada and Russia:
> China Railway first unveiled the 8,000-mile high-speed underwater railway project in 2014. The underwater train will connect China, Russia, Canada, and the U.S. including a 125-mile undersea tunnel spanning the Bering Strait then to Alaska.
> Beijing Times also reported that Russia is already onboard.
Chinese tourists don’t really have a great reputation (and honestly, it’s deserved). It’s hard to imagine a plan to continuously train them into the country will survive periods of Republican political control.
The cost of this seems way too low. Considering all of the planning and extras going with this.
Cosnidering that they're looking to go through Diomede (https://www.google.com/maps/place/Diomede,+Alaska+99762/@65....) I don't think that's too unreasonable for the underwater portion. It's a big long but with a project like this you have to go there.
The other big factor here is going through Alaska.. a lot of that land just isn't developed (nor does a lot of it have mobile signal. Consider what will happen if a train breaks down along the way)
Getting the US, CA, etc to go along with this in it's self is just too much of a stretch. CA is not fitted for high speed rail tracks. (Their train network resemebles that of Amtrak in it's current stage minus HSR) The US and Canada are unlikely to let Chinese developers to come in and mess with the rail here. (If they do that's a huge loss for riders and freight, because that would transfer ownership of the rails themselves)
I'm guessing here: But it feels like another pro-China fluf piece to advertise their recent high speed rail networks. Or it could be a drive to get investors and then 'walk away'.
Another wrench to throw into this: I doubt most people will spend 3d+ for this ride when a plane takes 14 hours. This will probably be used for freight.
I am flagging this. It does not cite any sources specifically enough to be worth anything. The other stories on the site are designed to amaze or shock readers but only insufficiently informed ones.
Railways are cheap if you can pick the route freely and optimise for low cost only.
Every extra constraint adds cost. If you have to cross a mountain range or a river at a specific point, you pay. If you have to enter a city, you pay. If you have to enter a city along a specific route, you pay. If you have to subsidise another project to get someone along the path to accept the proposal, you pay. If you have to support a certain speed, you pay. And so on.
In this case the only constraints appear to be that it has to cross the Bering straits where the tunnel is cheap (well, "cheap") and that it has to connect to the railway networks in each country it passes through. That's a lot of liberty for >10⁷ meters.
It's two days nonstop for a high-speed train or four if the route is optimised for cost of construction.
The Bering strait and associated waterways are already a source of tension between Canada, the US, and Russia as global climate change is anticipated to massively increase their commercial value.
And China would love to launch a boondoggle of a project that gives them an excuse to station a shit ton of staff and infrastructure in the area for the foreseeable future.
What did the US even get out of it's relationship with China? Cheap labor to make cheap things that we never really needed. Should've just injected tons of capital into South America and Mexico. Scholarships for the best and brightest of Latin America to come to Harvard and stuff.
It’s not clear whether America has benefited from the massive uncontrolled immigration from Mexico, and it is far from clear the free trade agreement with Mexico has been a huge plus.
Companies have simply used trade agreements with Mexico to avoid complying with strict regulations in the US.
It’s also not clear if Mexico and Latin America could have suitable infrastructure, even with massive investment. Geography is destiny and these regions have been cursed with poor geography.
The midwestern US is an industrialists dream come true: plenty of land, plentiful food, navigable waterways, excellent roadways, massive market on the coasts accessible by air and rail on top of ocean, river, and road. The question is, why doesn’t America invest in itself?
Brain draining the best of the Americas and increasing their economic infrastructure is nothing like "uncontrolled immigration". As for using those, or any free trade, as a dodge for US regulations, that seems like a larger problem that needs to get solved.
> The question is, why doesn’t America invest in itself?
What makes you think it hasn't? Manufacturing capacity has increased dramatically. It just happens to be in mostly automated factories which supply few jobs.
I think the US has won a lot more from all this than it lost. It exported low margin work abroad and kept high margin activities local. In doing so, it also attracted the world's best talent to immigrate and start enriching US companies (and pay taxes in the US).
Aside from edge cases, the vast majority of smart people I know move _from_ Canada/Mexico _to_ the US, and not the other way around. And having a lot of smart people is a huge competitive advantage in geopolitic. People without STEM degrees on the other hand don't get to access the US via NAFTA treaty. This treaty is basically a sieve that creates a brain drain in Canada/Mexico, to the benefit of the US, in exchange for some concessions on import tariffs.
And you're right that the US is an industrialists dream come true, and I think a wave of bringing back a lot of industry will happen, now that automation is more mature than it was before. And the US will be in a great position to support this, given all the highly educated people it produces locally and attracts from abroad. Basically, the US will have exported industry when it made sense to do it, and will have imported it back when the balance switched. I'd say that's not a bad deal.
I think Canada and Mexico belong to two separate categories. It is true that the US benefits from highly educated immigrants from Canada AND Mexico. In fact, the US benefits in this regard much more from India and China, than Canada and Mexico, which simply do not have the depth of the talent pool required to sustain US supremacy.
But the massive influx of immigrants from Mexico (and Central America) over the decades has not been of this kind. It has mostly been low-skilled or unskilled workers who form a growing underclass that can not participate effectively in civic society.
Of course, from the standpoint of sustaining population growth to slightly above replacement levels, immigration of unskilled/low-skilled immigrants is still a good thing. Unfortunately, the US population growth flattened out or went slightly into reverse in 2020. Whether this trend takes hold is anybody's guess, but given America's declining appetite for immigration in general, the worse may still be ahead of us.
As you say, though, automation may make slower population growth moot. Who knows!
> The question is, why doesn’t America invest in itself?
America stopped investing in itself because the ROI was much higher in countries with monumentally lower quality of living (and thus, lower worker wages and so on).
On a long enough timescale, this hopefully becomes a self correcting problem: technology and money flows out, improving the standard of living and wages elsewhere, until one day investing in the US makes the most financial sense.
America does invest into itself. But Americans generally don't want the investment.
* No one likes welfare. At best, Americans begrudgingly accept it when necessary, but many people (even poor people) refuse to accept it at all.
* Investments into Education are fraught with political issues. Spend $1 billion bucks on a new Math program and everyone loses their collective minds. Buy a new teacher and people think you're indoctrinating them with Critical Race Theory.
* Improve local land, and the leftists yell "Gentrification". Oh, I'm sorry I wanted to improve this area with parks and metro stations and bus stops. Yes, that increases rent prices in the area but what else did you expect to happen?
* Try to build low-income houses elsewhere and people stonewall you with NIMBYism. People don't like their property values declining, which happens when low-cost housing is made.
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At some point, its just not worth the political hassle. Americans largely don't want the money or things to change. It doesn't matter if they're right-wing or left-wing, changing cities for the better is change and scary.
> America does invest into itself. But Americans generally don't want the investment.
This is far from the case. Case in point: nearly 3 trillion and counting in public stimulus over the last couple of years. In fact, even the Republicans are mostly on board with many items from Biden's infrastructure bill, which is in the 2-3 trillion range.
> * No one likes welfare. At best, Americans begrudgingly accept it when necessary, but many people (even poor people) refuse to accept it at all.
This is something that is inherent in American culture, perhaps a bit more so than European countries. Americans as a group believe in 'pulling yourself by the bootstraps', more than any other group. However, support for investment into America is there. The proof is the massive stimulus bills that have passed, despite > 20 trillion of federal debt.
> This is far from the case. Case in point: nearly 3 trillion and counting in public stimulus over the last couple of years. In fact, even the Republicans are mostly on board with many items from Biden's infrastructure bill, which is in the 2-3 trillion range.
Lets think about how this would play out.
Money will come down from on-high at the Federal level. States will analyze their road systems, and decide "This traffic light should be converted into an overpass, causing 20% reduction in traffic in this area" (or something similar).
And what will happen with the local population? They'll go nuts. Some rightfully so (any such large infrastructure project would cause some houses to be displaced, to make room for the overpass). Others will care about gentrification and rising home prices. Still others will worry about debts and budgets.
That's what I mean. You'll have to force the infrastructure down people's throats if you actually want it to get done.
>It’s also not clear if Mexico and Latin America could have suitable infrastructure, even with massive investment. Geography is destiny and these regions have been cursed with poor geography.
We pretty much only got the Moscow State Circus from Russia during the cold war nominally. But that very well could have improved relations just enough to prevent a nuclear war.
Remember: the reason Kyoto wasn't nuked was because one general had a honeymoon in Kyoto. He put forth the idea that Kyoto (despite being a valid military target), was the cultural center of Japan, and nuking it would prevent the war from ever ending. Japan (probably) would never forgive us, and he proposed Hiroshima ... an important city but less culturally relevant than Kyoto.
That kind of thinking is needed in a hypothetical war. Even if you're 100% warmonger with China, the benefits of open dialog and open trade are huge.
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I'm not naive enough to think that trade prevents wars. But there is a "soothing" effect of trade for sure.
we crushed the USSR which was Nixon's plan when he reopened relations. Problem was that our leaders got addicted to the money they made from China and kept the relationship alive to line their pockets at the expense of America. Once the USSR collapsed we should have gone back to almost no trade with China
You got a win in the Cold War which was far from settled otherwise. If China instead had a détente with the USSR and they both made the transition to their current economies together we'd have a very, very different world, to the American detriment.
They shifted all the factories that turn nature into dystopian wasteland to China. On top of it got cheap labor and Americans enjoy their insatiable desire to consume.
> What did the US even get out of it's relationship with China?
According to economic orthodoxy as old as Adam Smith, trading with a large trading partner makes both countries more prosperous.
It also reduces the odds of a shooting war. A shooting war between nuclear powers is likely to escalate to the point where it ends the world.
Also, the most important benefit of the current relationship with China is that warhawks can always grouse about it to distract the American public from domestic problems.
Yeah but how much of those imports are actually important? Like some crappy electric lawnmowers, cheap plastic toys, crappy electric scooter that fat americans don't really need. Crappy smartphone, when someone could just buy a low end apple made in india or something. Probably the most important are medical devices.
> The top import categories (2-digit HS) in 2019 were: electrical machinery ($125 billion); machinery ($92 billion); furniture and bedding ($27 billion); toys and sports equipment ($25 billion); and plastics ($18 billion).
> U.S. imports of agricultural products from China totaled $3.6 billion in 2019, making China the United States’ 6th largest supplier of agricultural imports. Leading categories included: processed fruit and vegetables ($787 million); snack foods ($172 million); spices ($170 million); fresh vegetables ($136 million); and tea, including herbal tea ($131 million).
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#1 item imported from China is electronic machinery. #2 item is non-electronic machinery.
Your "cheap toys" comment is #4 at only $25 billion, a fraction of the amount of electronics we import from China.
So yes, "iPhones / Lenovo" is far more representative of our imports from China than whatever you're thinking.
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This is probably important to note: but the USA has no equivalent to the Shenzhen electronics marketplace. Yes, China has leapfrogged us in cheap and effective electronics manufacturing.
No, its not the "high-tech" stuff. But a lot of electronic assembly: from power supplies, to iPhones, to motherboards, happens in Shenzhen for a reason. The nuts-and-bolts of resistors, capacitors, motherboard manufacturing and the like are important.
USA holds the capability to make these things in smaller runs, but not as efficiently as Shenzhen. The closest we had was Silicon Valley, but that turned into software and the hardware/electronics component has basically disappeared. Yes, we have a "maker" movement, but over there, they have Shenzhen: a "maker city".
Ok, so what percentage of that stuff is actually high value-add?
How much useful USD capital and more importantly KNOWLEDGE capital was invested into China -- all so we can get lots of average and also crappy power supplies and 80's 90's electrical hardware tech? This could've been done in other places with the right investments.
I'm not saying China didn't do an amazing job. But given the outcome, a powerful autocratic nation that wants to usurp the world authority... was it really worth it for mediocre stuff that's slightly cheaper?
> Ok, so what percentage of that stuff is actually high value-add?
Millions of factory owners have individually decided that waiting 3+ weeks for shipping from Shenzhen was better than any US-based equivalent manufacturer, who probably could ship them the parts in just 5 days at much cheaper shipping prices.
There's no singular person from on high encouraging people to trade with China (at least, any more so than say NAFTA encourages trade with Mexico). This is an individual decision that was ad-hoc decided en-masse over multiple years.
In fact, we had a trade deal with all of Asia (except China) called the Trans-Pacific Partnership. So that we'd encourage trade with Vietnam, India, Mexico, Australia, Canada _INSTEAD_ of China. But we elected a President in 2016 who got rid of the trade deal (and instead pushed for ineffective Tariffs).
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Look, its Apple who decided to manufacture iPads and iPhones in China rather than the USA. In fact, President Obama famously sat down with Steve Jobs to ask him what the USA needed to bring manufacturing back to state-side.
Steve Jobs famously replied: nothing. There's nothing the USA could do to win back the iPad / iPhone. That's how big of a lead China has on manufacturing and assembly. At this point, its a question of what we, the USA can do, to win back the hearts and minds of manufacturers.
Thumping anti-Chinese attitudes is probably counterproductive. They see China as a superior manufacturing chain than USA. Its more important to recognize the reality, and begin to emulate Shenzhen. What can the USA do to "build our own Shenzhen" ??
"The steel contract went to a state-owned Chinese company, Shanghai Zhenhua Heavy Industries, which had several advantages: modern production facilities, ships to deliver the steel and, of course, low-cost labor."
I would say the cabling of a suspension bridge is pretty important.
now add in the fact that from the US POV that Russia and China are our two greatest threats. And so probably not a wise idea to make it any easier for them to move people, weapons or troops directly into a US state.
wait, are you seriously thinking if the US and China went to war China is going to load soldiers on a commercial underwater passenger train? we're not living in an asterix & obelix comic
In the event of a war, I cannot imagine a better thing than for your enemies to put their troops on an 8,000 mile train ride that has a substantial underwater tunnel.
It would be huge for China to become the world infrastructure leader, taking the helm at next-gen worldwide transport. I could see them doing this purely for geopolitical flex.
I can't imagine there's much value in the US for this, considering we have fairly low tourism to China (and getting the visa was a miserable process, personally) and fewer still would be interested in taking train since we don't have that sort of culture here.
By contrast, Chinese tourism is a huge industry and high speed rail is quite normalized in China.