Why China Builds Faster – Engineers vs. Lawyers in Power

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Second Youtube Channel (More Content but Less Polished Videos): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOE3eUdTzqAisHDn4v7yAXA Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/notjimmymaio/profilecard/?igsh=bm91cGM0YzN2dGFi All my Channels: linktr.ee/jimmymaio Imagine this: in just three decades, China built a high-speed rail network longer than the rest of the world combined. In fact, it poured more concrete in just three years than the United States did in the entire 20th century. Now compare that with America, where California’s bullet train is still unfinished after sixteen years of planning. Or look at New York’s Second Avenue Subway: first proposed in the 1920s, and yet it wasn’t until 2017 that the first phase finally opened—just two miles of track and three stations, at a staggering cost of $4.5 billion. Why is one country so good at building big things, while another struggles? The surprising answer: China is run by engineers, and America is run by lawyers. Let’s start with scale. In 1988, China had just one expressway. By 2015, it had 74,000 miles of expressways, nearly double the U.S. Interstate Highway System. In Guizhou province alone, there are over 3,500 bridges, 45 of which rank among the tallest in the world. And one bridge soars higher than the Eiffel Tower, connecting once-isolated villages across deep valleys. By 2024, China had 30,000 miles of high-speed rail . That’s like building a New York-to-Los Angeles line, then extending it all the way to London. These trains link Beijing to Shanghai in just 4.5 hours, compared to the 19-hour Amtrak journey between New York and Chicago. It’s no wonder people joke that every time you visit China, there’s a new skyline, a new subway line, or a new megabridge that wasn’t there before. Now let’s turn to the United States, where the story is almost the opposite. Take California’s high-speed rail project. It was announced in 2008 with huge excitement, promising to connect Los Angeles and San Francisco in under three hours by 2020. The budget was set at $33 billion, and supporters pitched it as the boldest new transportation project in the country in half a century. But sixteen years later, only a 171-mile stretch in the Central Valley is under construction. It connects Bakersfield to Merced—but not Los Angeles, not San Francisco, and certainly not at bullet-train speeds. Costs have soared toward $100 billion, and the project has become a symbol of American infrastructure paralysis. Legal battles over land acquisition, environmental reviews, and local opposition have slowed progress to a crawl. The irony? In the same time span, China built an entire nationwide high-speed rail network spanning thousands of miles.