China Going Up and Coming Down

SoCalChris writes "The BBC writes that China has just completed the world's highest railroad, climbing to 16,640 feet (5,072 meters) above sea level. The cars will be sealed to help passengers cope with the pressure changes from the altitude. The line is expected to begin carrying passengers next year." This news comes at the same time that their Chinese taikonauts return from their spaceflight after just 115 hours in orbit.

Comments

Good stuff

[alucinor]

I'm glad China's having good progress (in many respects). I do hope their government loosens up (maybe money'll soften them like it did ours) so they allow freedom (since it means more money) to speech and internet and whatnot. Just tell them that!

Now, I really really do hope China doesn't make giant killer robot, and I'll be fine with them for good.

Har har.

[ToasterofDOOM]

You had me until the 'capitalist' part. Chinese have so few freedoms, and businesses are no exception. I researched them for a human right project last year and, while there are many successful businesses in China, it happens falsely most of the time with heavy government interference. Without it much of their economy would crumble. Most of the big names in Chinese business are at least partially government owned or run. While they are not entirely 1984, i wouldn't go so far as to call them capitalism either, I'd rather not soil that name.

Re:Har har.

[Stonehand]

He may have a valid point, however, about the government playing a large and not necessarily fair role. Capitalism to a large degree depends on even-handed enforcement of certain rules, such as prohibitions on outright fraud and sanctions for breaches of contract. In addition, the greater the government is directly involved as a buyer or seller and the more unified it is, the less you might trust its ability to objectively investigate possible malfeasances when you consider conflicts of interest and assorted entanglements.

Beijing tacitly acknowledges this through the occasional high-profile crackdown, and the occasional extreme severity such as sentencing a former governor to death.

http://www.transparency.org/cpi/2004/cpi2004.en.ht ml#cpi2004
http://www.abc.net.au/ra/news/stories/s1471412.htm
http://english.people.com.cn/200509/09/eng20050909 _207609.html
http://www.carnegieendowment.org/events/index.cfm? fa=eventDetail&id=284

It's a reasonable concern if you're thinking about a large capital investment that you can't simply take with you if local officials decide to squeeze you after you're committed -- perhaps demanding direct bribes, or using governmental powers against you if you don't throw business to somebody, or so forth. Granted, it's probably not nearly as foolhardy as trying to run a high-profile independent media network in Putin's Russia...

Re:Must be light-weight trains or maybe COG

[Anonymous Coward]

or maybe Cog rail, like the one to pikes peak

Re:Congratulations China!

[ngsayjoe]

Never forget Egyptians built the first Great Pyramids 5000 years ago, and now they have tumbled to the point of technological weaklings. And this tells me that even tough US is the technology leader now, but things can change over time. I'll just sit back and see how China will take over the world (in terms of technological advancement). With over 1 billion smart people, this will only happen sooner or later.

Re:PR Spin?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure. Bringing the richness of Chinese cultural across the broad land.

Except Chinese workers replace Tibetan workers, meaning the only way for Tibetans to earn a living is to be completely co-opted into Chinese society. And that means no more Tibetan culture and Tibetan religion strictly on Chinese terms. Tibetans become a minority in their own lands and the culture disappears.

NEVER forget that part of Chinese "progress" is heavy duty state control. Do not impose western assumptions of freedom onto China - on the surface they may be advancing, but underneath it is a pretty nasty place.

Tibetan cultural genocide is the right term.

s/Tibet/Iraq/g

[p2sam]

For all comments, I substitute Tibet with Iraq, and China with US to INFINITY!! haha, I win!!

PS: also s/falun gong/terroism/g

People moving in?

[YesIAmAScript]

Although not quite innocuous, I fail to get overexcited about people moving in.

When people from Northern California (where I live now) bitch about people moving in from elsewhere, I don't exactly sympathize with them. So I don't automatically sympathize here.

Should I go and bury I-80 at Donner Lake because it just makes it easier for people to come over the (formerly protective) Sierra Nevada mountains and settle here?

Or should I go and pry out the "golden spike" in Promentory Point, Utah, because rails made it easy 100 years ago?

Of course China is investing in infrastructure to move people. We do it too.

Now, that being said, I'm not in favor of ethnic cleansing or killing of any sort. But just people settling? Well, there's a lot of people on this planet now. Everyone has to make a little room for closer neighbors.

not sure about that...

[Quadraginta]

First the average person is just fine at 16,500. Yeah, they will be a bit light headed, but nothing too bad...

I don't know about that. When I climbed Longs Peak in Colorado, about 14,000', I was sick as a dog and couldn't really think straight. And that's after living two months in Boulder (5150'). I recall recently climbing Mt. San Gorgonio in Southern California (11,500') with someone else, and we had to turn back at about 10,000' because she got seriously disoriented and out of breath, the first signs of altitude sickness.

Now, it could be I don't know any average people, but my personal experience says that 16,000' would be pretty serious without acclimatization, especially if, like me, you're no longer that young. I would certainly hesitate to try it without knowing I had oxygen standing by.

For one thing, the *first* thing that goes wrong when you have altitude sickness is your judgment. You start to make dumbass decisions, and lose track of time, and wander in your thoughts. Indeed, this mental dullness is suspected by some people for the climbing disaster on Everest in 1996 described by Jon Krakauer in his absorbing book, Into Thin Air.

Cheap gasoline

[Goonie]

Fuel is much more expensive in Europe than the United States, so your $20 in gas is probably closer to the equivalent of $40 in much of Europe (though Europeans generally drive smaller, more fuel-efficient cars to compensate).

The second thing to keep in mind is that because the public transport systems within cities are so much better (New York is a bit of an exception, as the subway on Manhattan is very good), a lot of Europeans simply don't own a car even if they can afford it. Therefore, even if the train is a bit dearer in terms of variable cost, the money saved by not owning, garaging and servicing a car more than makes up for it.