China isn’t exactly the place to look towards when it comes to public transit, there’s way better countries to be envious of when it comes to public transport. Their highspeed rail system by itself is around $900 BILLION in debt. It is so overly built that the maintenance costs and insufficient demand is coming to bite them in the ass. To put things in perspective, this figure is around 5% of China’s entire GDP and it is expected to grow as the years pass by. It’s generally normal for public transportation system to not be profitable and for the government to cover the gaps, but this? This is absolutely insane.
There’s stuff that we could learn from them as a country and vice versa, but this is definitely not one of those things.