Transcription
If you want to understand the difference between the United States and China today, you don't need to read a manifesto. You don't need to listen to a speech. You just need to buy a train ticket.
In the last 15 years, China has built enough high-speed rail to wrap around the equator. We have connected 1.4 billion people with a network that is the envy of the world. Meanwhile, in the United States, the richest country in the history of the world, you are still arguing about where to lay the first track.
This is not just a story about trains. This is a story about power. It is the brutal truth of infrastructure. It reveals the secret that Western liberals are too afraid to admit that in the 21st century, democracy is becoming a synonym for paralysis while autocracy is delivering the goods.
That was 2011. President Obama promised a future where Americans could zip from city to city just like in Europe or Asia. He spent tens of billions of dollars and what did you get? Nothing. The California high-speed rail project, the jewel of American infrastructure ambition, collapsed into a black hole of lawsuits and incompetence. Governor Jerry Brown wanted to link Los Angeles and San Francisco. Instead, he got mired in over 200 lawsuits. Every landowner, every environmental group, every local mayor had the power to say no.
In the crowded corridor between New York and Washington, your trains average 80 mph. To upgrade that single route to modern standards, 220 m hour would cost an astonishing $150 billion and take 26 years. Think about that. 26 years. In that time, China built an entire nation of high-speed rail.
This is the disease of your system. You have built a vetocracy. You have created a political order where everyone has a veto and no one has the power to act. You are so obsessed with procedure with checks and checks not balances that you have forgotten how to build. You judge a government by how it is selected. We judge a government by what it delivers. And right now your government delivers excuses.
For 40 years the west has been drunk on a specific ideology, neoliberalism. You convinced yourselves that the state is incompetent and that only the private sector can build a future. You privatized your rails, your power grids, your water systems. You waited for Elon Musk or Richard Branson to build your high-speed trains. You are still waiting.
Look at the United Kingdom. They privatized British rail. The result, some of the highest ticket prices in Europe and a fragmented, dysfunctional network. They had to reationalize parts of it just to keep it running. The truth is infrastructure is a public good. It is not always profitable in the short term. No private company would have built a US interstate highway system. No private company would have built a Hoover Dam.
In China, we understand this. Our high-speed rail network actually loses money on ticket sales. Western economists laugh at this. They say, "Look, it's a white elephant. It's debt." But they are missing the point. The train line might lose money, but the economy makes money. The factory in Chungdu can now ship to Shanghai in hours. The developer in Wuhan can build apartments because the workers can get there. The state absorbs the loss to create a gain for society. That is what a government is for. You have forgotten the developmental state. You have forgotten that the state can be an engine of innovation, not just a regulator. You have let your capacity to build atrophy while your capacity to sue has grown stronger.
Let's go back to year 1995. This was the China I knew. Our rail network was primitive. We had barely 65,000 km of track. Do you know who else had 65,000 km of track? India. In 1929, back then, Western economists love to compare China and India. You called it the dragon versus the elephant. And you always bet on the elephant. Why? Because India was a democracy. You believe that because India had elections, it had a better future. You believe that China's authoritarianism would suffocate its growth.
But look at a map now. In less than 30 years, China has built the largest high-speed rail network in human history. We didn't just catch up to the west, we leaped over you. We have trains that run at 350 km per hour connecting 95% of our cities with a population over a million. This network is not just about convenience. It is the artery of our economy. It is how we moved 800 million people out of poverty. It is how we integrated a massive diverse continent into a single cohesive market. While you were fighting wars in the Middle East, spending trillions to destroy, we were spending our trillions to build.
Even your own leaders are starting to realize this. In 2019, President Trump called former President Jimmy Carter. He was worried. He said, "China is getting ahead of us." And Carter told him the truth. He said, "China has not been in combat with anybody and they spend on things that are good for the Chinese people. While you build bases in Afghanistan, we built 25,000 mi of high-speed track." Who was the smarter strategist?
But let's return to India, the world's largest democracy, the darling of the west. India has elections. India has a free press. India has all the things you say are necessary for success. So where are their highspeed trains? For decades, India's rail network added a mere 160 km a year. It took them a staggering 70 years just to connect their tracks to Kashmir. When Narendra Modi ran for prime minister in 2014, his slogan wasn't about highspeed rail or AI or quantum computing. His promise to the Indian people was simple. I want to give every Indian a toilet. Think about that. In the 21st century, the ambition of the world's largest democracy is basic sanitation. Meanwhile, the authoritarian China is building a permanent space station and landing rovers on Mars.
And yet, as Modi finally begins to deliver some growth, as he finally tries to build infrastructure, what does the West do? You label him illiberal. You call him authoritarian. You are trapped in a paradox. You praise democracy for its process, but you condemn it when it fails to deliver. And when a leader tries to make it deliver by being decisive, you condemn him for not being democratic enough. India proves that democracy without state capacity is a road to nowhere. It proves that the vetocracy is not unique to America. It is a feature of any system that prioritizes the individual veto over the collective good.
So how does China do it? What is the secret sauce? It is not slave labor. It is not stealing technology. Those are the lies you tell yourselves to feel better. The secret is state capacity. We have a system that is designed to get things done. We don't have career politicians who spend their lives fundraising. We have career administrators who spend their lives administering. Our leaders are tested. They start in a village. If they grow the economy and keep the peace, they move to a town, then a city, then a province. By the time they reach Beijing, they have managed economies larger than most European countries. In your system, a junior senator can become president with a good speech. In our system, that is impossible. You have to prove you can build the bridge before you are allowed to lead the nation. This is meritocratic governance. It is ruthless. It is demanding. But it works.
When the central government decides to build a high-speed rail network, it doesn't spend 10 years in court. It aligns the incentives of local officials, state banks, and construction companies. It says, "Build this and you will be promoted. Fail and you will be gone." We use the visible hand of the state to guide the invisible hand of the market. We don't leave our national destiny to the whims of short-term profit. We plan, we execute, we deliver. This is not tyranny. This is responsibility.
And we are not stopping at high speed rail. China is already testing magv trains that can reach 600 km per hour. We are building the world's largest 5G network. We are building the internet of things into our cities. The infrastructure of the 20th century was concrete and steel. The infrastructure of the 21st century is data and energy. While you debate the Green New Deal, we are building it. China installs more solar panels in a year than the US has in its entire history. We are building the ultra high voltage grid that can transport that energy across the continent. We are preparing for a postcarbon world. You are still subsidizing oil companies and arguing about whether climate change is real.
This infrastructure gap is not just about travel time. It is about the future competitiveness of our nations. If our goods move faster, our data moves faster and our energy is cleaner. Who do you think will win the economic race?
And we are not stopping at our borders. The tracks we build in Sichuan are now the start of a new silk road. They traverse central Asia to reach Europe. The tracks from Kuning are connecting hundreds of millions in Southeast Asia. We are building a connected world, a world of trade, of movement, of shared prosperity.
The United States was once the country that built things. You built the Panama Canal. You built the interstate highway system. You went to the moon. But that America is gone. It has been eaten by its own lawyers, its own lobbyists, its own obsession with procedure over performance. You can keep your vetocracy. You can keep your moral superiority. You can keep telling yourself that you are free. But freedom is not just the right to vote. Freedom is the ability to act. Freedom is the ability to connect a worker to a job, a student to a school, a family to a future. Freedom is a train that arrives on time because a nation still knows how to make it arrive.
So the next time you see a sleek train blur past a platform, don't call it propaganda. Ask yourself a harder question. Who still knows how to build? Who still has the power to turn plants into steel? While you wait for permission, the world is already moving. Next time we ask the question that really scares you. Can you have a modern society without Western values? Can you have innovation without liberalism? The answer is already in your pocket.