Reg Australian and the west are always going to have the burden of multiparty elections the rule of law and such things that china doesn't have to worry it's self with to slow change down.

What i find most interesting in your fanboy articles for all things made in China is the absence of any thought that Chinese people may actual want some of those things rather then fast trains and people in space? in that respect China is a long way behind.

Freedom cost more then a fast train Reg.

Wonder away.
While other countries have employed thirty year, self terminating bonds, our govts, all of them have been busy busy selling the family farm or hocking the family silverware, or selling huge chunks of the national estate, or creating additional tax burdens and quite massive complexity; and excess regulations!? As well as, enabling price gouging privatized energy prices, that together, simply force business to relocate offshore, along with the tax receipts they used to contribute!
Perhaps it's the cringe culture? Perhaps it's just super incompetent pollies, who would be intellectually challenged running a chook raffle, let alone a multibillion dollar budget or dept.
Or perhaps it's simple self interest, being made manifestly more important than the national interest, which in the cited cases, have allowed other, poorer, far less well resourced countries to catch up, then go flying past us, as actually well performing economies!
Or maybe it's just the ideological straight jacket, our pollies have voluntarily struggled into, which has then allowed other countries, which don't go round mumbling nonsense mantras, like the govt has no business in business, to go flying on by, as well performing economic entities. All while we wait for somebody else to do it for us!
I mean, can you believe it, they even tanked the roll out of the NBN, just to satisfy an ideological imperative?
God help us if we're ever forced into a hot war, with some of these patently problematic, no-can-do people at the helm!
Rhrosty.

We don't have VF Trains because we don't need them, we have air services.

At 300 kph it would take 3 hours by VFT at the best, the flight time is 1 hour and 25 minutes and even with the time that it takes to reach/leave the airport, air travel is faster.

Reg, another interesting and important contribution. I know you have space constraints, but I would have liked to see some discussion on the huge significance of the Chinese government developing fast trains to Europe, via southern and northern alternative routes. This has both trade and security implications and is manifestly designed, at least in part, to bypass the clumsy attempts to encircle China by the US and its allies, of which Australia is a typically clumsy participant. We need to decide where our vital interests as a nation lie.

The other point that struck me is the recent ruling out of Huawai as a tenderer for the NBN network, ostensibly on security grounds. Given the revelations of NSA wholesale spying on its "friends" excluding Huawai is a sick joke. We know that the spying is at the least intended to garner commercial information for exploitation by US companies. It is also a vehicle for collecting information to use in blackmailing uncooperative foreign politicians.

We need to see the world as it really is and not the delusional nonsense that comes from the mouths of Abbott, Bishop, Morrison et al.

I meant to put in "Sydney to Melbourne".

Articles like this one puzzle me greatly.

To begin with, comparing the transport systems of two countries, one with a population sixty times greater - and a population density fifty times greater - than the other, is particularly silly. The travel needs of each will inevitably differ, there is no value in pretending that one particular form of transport is of equal benefit to both. VFTs are clearly appropriate in places like China, Japan and to some extent Europe. There is no logical extension that says they would work here, even if we were able to overcome the NIMBY issue.

Building the "world's fastest" supercomputer, as any technologist can tell you, is about as significant, in technological terms, as the Blue Riband, awarded to ships crossing the Altlantic quickly, used to be.

It isn't the first time a Chinese machine has topped the list. They did so in 2010 with the predecessor to this one, the Tianhe-1A, which was overtaken within a few months by Fujitsu's K system, which was in turn passed by Cray's Titan.

Oh, and Tianhe-2 is built entirely using Intel chips.

The reality is that neither of these "achievements" deserves the author's breathless claim that...

"The Very Fast Train and the Very Fast Computer pose the rest of the world with some major issues."

The world turns. China has developed very quickly over the past twenty-odd years, through a combination of shrewd exploitation of its key assets - 1.3 billion people and an extensive, mineral-rich landmass - and a political command-and-control system that survives because it has lifted so many of its citizens out of poverty, and created a middle class of avid consumers.

We are at the end of our affluence curve, China is well on its way up the foothills. We cannot emulate them, we don't have either the resources or the culture to do so. So it is pointless to imagine that we can do anything more than adjust to the changing economic structure of the world around us.

To suggest otherwise is an exercise in futility.