Asking why we don't have a high speed cross country railroad in a nation that had most of its airports build out 60 years ago is an excellent pattern match for odd complaints.*
Thinking whether you're a Sinophile is a subject of discussion, and then most damningly, your closing thought being whether other people think "the west will prevail" shows there's a lot more going on here than the idea that maybe overcapacity is good. Way more than I expected, so I'll leave it at "overcapacity is bad". :)
* n.b. for future arguments I'd avoid this, a map shows china's is cross country in that you can piece together, exactly one route that is high speed only, requires multiple transfers, and leaves you about 20% short of a full horizontal trip cross country while taking a winding route that wasn't designed for it.
If you're going to disagree, can you do us all a favor by not misrepresenting my words?
> Asking why we don't have a high speed cross country railroad
I asked where the high speed rail is, because parent claimed China is building out infrastructure "we built a 100 years ago" - which is patently untrue. I even quoted parent, so you can't have missed that.
> damningly, your closing thought being whether other people think "the west will prevail"
Bravo! That's a tabloid-worthy recontextualization hit-job - you cut off the part I considered so important I originally added emphasis to it, and added your commentary to give my surviving words an unflattering meaning of your choosing that was never there. I said "...an almost religious belief that the west will prevail because it's the west"
A good day to you.
"cross country" doesn't mean east-west. china doesn't have a straight east-west high speed line that goes across the entire country because the population is overwhelmingly concentrated in the east, and there are routes that cross north-south and all through all the major population centers.
china also had many airports before they built the high speed system.