Someone on Wikipedia added the following a few days ago:
China's HSR system as a whole, however, has incurred massive financial losses.[9] In terms of annual operating revenues and expenditures, only six lines break even while the rest have huge losses.[10] Most of the newer lines suffer from low passenger volumes, as many of their stations are located well outside centers of metro areas and without direct local highway nor light rail connections. Officials have used high-speed rail construction primarily to drive up land value for land sales, especially in third and fourth-tier cities, rather than prioritizing convenience and affordability of ordinary travelers.[11] As of the end of 2023, China's HSR system has an accumulated debt of $839 billion due to opaque financing by local governments.[12]
Here are the sources:
If you look at the sources, [9] is from the "libertarian" Reason Foundation which is pro-car and anti-transit, and the editor presented it as an outright fact. [10] is not true (it's also a dead link for an article from WSJ which is questionably framed); more than six lines are profitable to some extent and the "huge losses" are the exception and not the norm.
What is most problematic is [11], which has been thoroughly rebutted here (this person has great English-language coverage of transit in China, please check them out!).
The person doesn't even acknowledge the controversy that each of the these sources have. I wonder if there's an agenda going on, or if the liberal narratives have been repeated so much such that people just unironically believe them.
Infrastructure that connects a whole country, makes the developed coast and the less developed inland less separated, and reduces the need for car and air travel, needs to make a profit or it is a failure.
Pewpew guns and shooty missiles and vroom vroom tanks and explody bombs and honk honk battleships may cost some amount of money to make and deploy, but any such cost is more than paid back for when, you know, um, we epically own the bad guys or something
even from a capitalist perspective this is short-sighted and makes little sense
have they ever heard of the concept of a loss-leader?
make a relatively small loss on the trains, get a shitload of people into the cities to buy stuff
US capitalists think that AI slop, the imaginary idea of AGI, and accelerating people losing their jobs somehow are better loss leaders than proven transit infrastructure; they're basically trying to sink the ship we're on and build gilded lifeboats for themselves.