Most forms of transport aren't subsidized. Air travel and road travel isn't. Cargo shipping isn't.
> The fact that people can travel between cities easily and quickly facilitates business.
Governments like claiming this but dig in and you'll find they have no robust evidence for it. It also just fails a quick reality check: if it were true then passenger railways would be profitable in their own right, as businesses would be happy to buy tickets for employees at their true costs. Yet passenger rail is never profitable and what we see in reality is lots of workers preferring to work from home than take even the subsidized railways into the cities.
You can argue for trains as a lifestyle thing, maybe even an environmental thing although EV are changing that. But you can't argue for them economically.
> HSR is heavily utilized in China.
HSR is famously mostly empty in China. Go read accounts of anyone who has travelled on the newer lines.
> Lower spending on consumption isn't because there aren't products on the shelves
Nobody stacks shelves with products that will never be sold. Lower spending on consumption means the goods are being exported, and Chinese people aren't buying what they make because they don't have enough trust in the system to do so. Hence so much money being ploughed into real estate bubbles (an attempt to save money in something that's hard to confiscate).
> Air travel and road travel isn't. Cargo shipping isn't.
I don't know about cargo shipping, but both air and road travel are subsidized (and I strongly suspect the same is the case for cargo shipping).
> It also just fails a quick reality check: if it were true then passenger railways would be profitable in their own right, as businesses would be happy to buy tickets for employees at their true costs.
What you're effectively arguing is that the only way to measure whether basic infrastructure has positive externalities is to ask whether it turns a profit. By that argument, all government spending on infrastructure is wasteful - a position that I think is obviously wrong.
> HSR is famously mostly empty in China. Go read accounts of anyone who has travelled on the newer lines.
I've traveled on Chinese HSR many times. It is extremely heavily used. Trains are usually packed. I've had to buy first-class tickets before, simply because the regular carriages were completely sold out (luckily, first class is not too expensive on Chinese HSR, and the upgrade is definitely worth it).
What are you basing your impression of HSR being empty on? Are you basing that on newspaper articles in Western press, on first-hand experience, on data, or on something else?
> Nobody stacks shelves with products that will never be sold.
You began by comparing China to the USSR, and talking about Yeltsin was shaken by the abundance of consumer products in the US. This comparison just completely fails when it comes to China. The China of today has a crazy abundance of consumer goods for sale. The malls are full of every type of shop with full shelves. There are packed markets with stalls selling everything. You can buy pretty much any consumer product you can imagine on your smartphone. There are endless numbers of couriers driving on electric scooters throughout every Chinese city, delivering people's online orders. Your image of what China is like is just completely out of date.