China is living in the future because they have highway intersections? I really don't get this meme. You can find large highway intersections in the US too and that doesn't make the US any better. Honestly I would say the opposite.
this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2026
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They've blended urban infrastructure with a bunch of green space, and that's certainly nice. Would be even better if that cloverleaf highway was a rail line instead.
But if the worst thing you can say about Chinese urbanism is "It could use a few more trains"... eh.
China is making rapid improvements in high speed rail. It would be nice if we could get that kind of motivation in other countries.
We've got this kind of motivation, only its going to datacenters for the benefit of a handful of trillionaire megalomaniacs, rather than for commercial grade infrastructure that benefits the public at large.
It's incredibly annoying that we should have the fastest bullet train network and we don't.
I mean, it doesn't even have to be a race. I would happily accept a median tier bullet train network. A measly 160 MPH intercity rail, with a very stadid 60-80 MPH intracity commuter rail would be perfectly fine.
I want our trains to have to deal with the speed of sound.
That photo is kinda depressing. Muddy river, a massive highway interchange, faceless skyscrapers and some smog to boot. Having been to China, it is full of places so much nicer than that.
Rivers get muddy after rain. The Missouri River has been called "Big Muddy" for centuries because it used to flood from snow pack melt from the Rockies every year.
And if there's one thing I know about Chongqing, it's that it's hot and rainy.
Well, at least the river won't get so muddy as the future becomes the present, and there isn't any snowpack to melt.
Silver linings I guess?
It'll get plenty muddy. All the farmland west of the Mississippi to the Rockies drains right into it. The river is polluted AF now. But bog rivers are always muddy
Why is that depressing? I see mixed urban greenery with lots of city infrastructure.
Highways are not city infrastructure
Highways are awful city infrastructure. They are loud, polluting, dangerous, socially detrimental, and ugly. What if you have to get to other side of this river, or even just the other side of the highway? You probably need a car to do any of that.
Skyscrapers are a bad way to build a city. They exacerbate social inequality and generally require transportation for people to get to their jobs. Transportation which, it looks like, is limited to cars - there's not even a bus lane on the 5-lane highway full of traffic, so a bus will be slow as fuck.
This is basically the same as many north american cities, but with a more pronounced cloverleaf and a viewing platform to look at it.
Show me the metro lines connecting walkable neighborhoods. Or high-speed trains between well-developed city centers. Or any other good urbanism. China has it but for some reason photos aimed at the western audiences focus on "we built even more asphalt and concrete so that a highway looks slightly more interesting from afar".
lol this is a very unfair analysis of a very obviously HIGHLY packed citizen center. These photos are aimed at western audiences because the capitalist brain, where the first image probably originates, only understands good infrastructure as “cool highways and huge buildings” I’ve been trying to get Pedestrian bridges over the state highways here forever. They don’t even consider it because nobodies died yet and they just spent tens of millions on a new highway infrastructure that’s very dangerous to walk across. Guess who gives a fuck tho, nobody.
Show me the metro lines connecting walkable neighborhoods. Or high-speed trains between well-developed city centers
China has more high speed rail than every other country combined: https://youtu.be/zkMnxJF22O8
China has it but for some reason photos aimed at the western audiences focus on “we built even more asphalt and concrete so that a highway looks slightly more interesting from afar”.
I gotta say I think this photo is one of the worst ways one could have shown the advancements China has made. China's done a lot more than lil highway loopies, a bridge, and a ring shaped viewing platform
'murican mind can only understand things in cars and burgers
Sure, but then people could complain that that is not median China.
This looks like median China.
It’d actually be pretty easy to contrast Chinese infra projects against collapsing American bridges, but I guess wojaks saying unattributed quotes unrelated to civil engineering will do?
China's not living in the future. America just stopped building
China is absolutely living in the future by every measure you can think of. Robots are common place, there's high speed rail everywhere, energy production is rapidly shifting to renewables and nuclear. Most vehicles are now electric. These are all the things we were promised that we'd see in the world of tomorrow, and that's where China is at.
What I'm saying is, America left itself behind. China is modern, it just looks futuristic because they actually invested in thier country. America got old, and out sourced everything.
oh yeah for sure
more like they're living in the present while everyone else is in the past.
Highly disagree with this.
Even if you ignore the PRC's primary materialist / world-historic acheivement over the last few decades (lifting more people out of poverty than any country in history), then you still have futuristic / sci-fi things like:
ELECTRICITY MIX (PERCENTAGE)
============================================================
2010: [████████████████████████] 61% Coal | 39% Clean
2025: [████████████████] 32% Coal | 68% Clean
2030: [████████████] ~25% Coal (target) | 75% Clean (target)
============================================================
- Rapid development of fusion power.
- Space missions like a planned moon landing possibly as soon as the 2030s, and planned mars landings for 2040s.
These are star trek / bucky fuller level ideas.