> People take HSR sometimes because it's heavily subsidized, especially in China.

Most forms of transportation are subsidized. Good transportation infrastructure benefits the entire economy, so governments subsidize it. The fact that people can travel between cities easily and quickly facilitates business.

> China's railway is in a staggering amount of debt due to mass overbuilding

HSR is heavily utilized in China. A lot of the continued rail construction is because existing lines are butting up against capacity constraints.

> Products for export, yes.

I'm talking about products in their own shops. Chinese consumers have access to a much wider array of consumer products than Americans have.

> private consumption accounts for just 39% of the economy

Now, you're mixing completely different topics. Lower spending on consumption isn't because there aren't products on the shelves. It has to do with things like Chinese people's propensity to save, China directing more of its GDP into investment, and on the flipside, the United States' trade deficit.

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).

the low consumption as part of GDP also has to do with different ways of reporting GDP. they dont include some government funded services in the consumption share of GDP, when similar services are included in other countries consumption shares.

china consumes 30% of cars, 20% of mobile phones, 40% of televisions, 25% of furniture, etc. in basically every consumer category they exceed 20%. how can that be true and at the same time they have an abnormally low "true" consumption rate?

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/china-household...

https://asiatimes.com/2023/11/consumption-in-china-is-it-rea...