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The Problem with the MBTA’s New Rail Cars (A Hint: It’s China)

May 19, 2021 By Ryan

Joan Vennochi has a good column out on how the MBTA’s $1 billion rail car contract with CRRC — owned by the Chinese government — has failed to deliver for Massachusetts.

As she notes, China’s state-owned business ‘blew away’ the competition with its initial bid, but has (predictably) faltered at every conceivable level.

For these failures, Congressman Neal helped reward the CRRC (and thus the Chinese Communist Party) by protecting their investment, securing language that prevented CRRC from facing federal scrutiny.

What’s Massachusetts got out of this deal? Only a few delivered trains, none of which are as of yet safe to operate.

This was a really stupid deal for Massachusetts — the epitome of ‘too good to be true.’ We should use the CRRC’s repeated failures as a chance to cancel the deal, and hopefully claw back some of the money.

Of course, CRRC’s failures are just the excuse we should use. The real issue here is national security — the fact that this deal is dangerous for Massachusetts and our country.

When the contract bid was first being floated, some experts warned about the potential they could be used as intelligence assets for the Chinese government — “spy trains.”

We normal people mostly laughed that off at the time, even though China spies on every facet of American life (and the lives of our allies) every minute of every day, and the problem has drastically ramped up in recent years.

These issues have real world consequences for US citizens and our allies. Heck, just look at what China did to Nortel, one of the world’s (former) global leaders in networking: every facet of the company was penetrated by the Chinese state to make way for Huawei, and China’s control of huge swaths of the world’s 5G. Nortel quickly went from a powerhouse to bankrupt.

So maybe we shouldn’t laugh “spy trains” off?

Even if we could, however, that doesn’t mean China wouldn’t weaponize the CRRC against America in far more important ways.

The CRRC’s deal should be viewed in a similar context to the Belt and Road Initiative — China’s global building spree to control major aspects of other country’s critical infrastucture, giving China huge leverage over those other countries, and geopolitics as a whole.

The MBTA deal helped gain China a foothold in America’s mass transit infrastructure, and China has been clear it would like to grow that foothold — gaining marketshare at the expense of others.

Trains and rail cars for major subway systems are hard to build. It won’t take much for other companies to get driven out of the US market — especially if they get “Nortelled.”

As a state-owned business, CRRC doesn’t need to worry about profit margins. China is happy to “profit” in other ways. So CRRC can continue to underbid, especially if states like ours continue to turn a blind eye when China fails to deliver.

Last but not least, an expanded CRRC foothold in the US means the CRRC would represent hundreds of infrastructure-based jobs in Congressional districts across the country — especially if CRRC is successful in gaining marketshare.

That is a rather awkward position for any Congressmember to be in. They’re thinking about jobs, not China — but President Xi was no doubt tickled pink when someone as powerful as Congressman Neal went to bat for China instead of US national security interests. It doesn’t matter if Congressman Neal only cared about the jobs — the jobs are Xi’s leverage.

Whether it’s the potential for spying, the foothold China could gain over our own infrastructure — or the jobs the CCP could hold over our Congressmembers — why in the world would we want to allow any of this?

Especially if China’s state-owned business is going to fail to meet their promises and build shoddy trains anyway?

Charlie Baker should call the state’s best lawyers and get us out of the deal, then call everyone he knows in DC to help us get federal funding for a new MBTA contract — preferably from a company that isn’t owned by a foreign adversary who’d use the deal against us.

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Comments

  1. Christopher says

    May 20, 2021 at 1:12 pm

    Welcome back!

  2. SomervilleTom says

    May 20, 2021 at 1:42 pm

    I join Christopher in an enthusiastic “welcome back”.

    Why in the world would we want to allow any of this?

    It strikes me as more evidence that the movers and shakers who have controlled Massachusetts governance for decades hate public transportation — especially rail transportation. This was and continues to be a political godsend. Politicians can get all sorts of creds and kudos for “promoting jobs”, “fiscal discipline”, and “improving public transportation” while actually killing it. It’s much easier to cluck-cluck and whine about those awful Chinese than to actually face the difficult choices that confront our legislators about transportation in Massachusetts.

    Our government officials fall over each other when crucial pieces of our highway infrastructure fail (most often from neglect, since our electorate eagerly rewards slashing taxes and spending and punishes any attempt to actually invest wisely) but can’t be bothered to care when the entire public transportation network collapses (such as a few winters ago).

    I don’t expect anything to change very much.

    • Christopher says

      May 20, 2021 at 4:27 pm

      Wouldn’t actually improving public transportation have the added benefits of “promoting jobs” and “fiscal discipline”?

      • SomervilleTom says

        May 20, 2021 at 9:21 pm

        Yes, of course.

        But it requires raising taxes, and it requires that legislators from districts without MBTA service agree to spend public money in ways that do not directly benefit their districts.

        The great advantage of lies like the CRRC is that they sound great, they make great headlines, and when the shinola hits the fan it’s the fault of those evil foreigners (in this case the Chinese).

        Which is not to say in any way that Chinese are not truly evil — in the context of discussions like this they are surely not our friends. Still, that actually works to the advantage of the current lege.

        • Christopher says

          May 20, 2021 at 10:20 pm

          I have not closely analyzed this, but my gut says that given that the MBTA serves densely populated areas and that legislative districts are drawn by population then the majority of House and Senate districts are served by the MBTA if you take into account all of its forms.

          • SomervilleTom says

            May 20, 2021 at 11:46 pm

            I don’t think it works that way in practice.

            If it did, there would be more support for rail transportation and less for building more highways. In particular, there is precious little support for rail transportation in western MA.

            • Christopher says

              May 21, 2021 at 7:05 pm

              Well, part of the plan could be to bring rail to western MA. Yes, extend the Commuter Rail from Boston to Springfield, but also make Springfield a hub in its own right, with connections to Pittsfield, Adams, and possibly even Hartford and Albany.

              • SomervilleTom says

                May 23, 2021 at 8:08 pm

                Could be, yes, and I would of course enthusiastically support it if it was proposed.

                It hasn’t happened, though. For better or worse, the electorate of western MA is deeply attached to the automobile. It’s a Catch-22 — there is no appetite for rail transportation because of automobiles, and the lack of appetite for rail transportation perpetuates the region’s dependence on the automobile.

                I suspect this will continue until automobiles are not an option. Then it will be a “crisis” and an “emergency”.

        • Ryan says

          May 20, 2021 at 11:00 pm

          I should have been clearer with my headline — it’s the CCP that’s the problem with this contract. No one’s suffered more at the hands of the CCP than the Chinese people.

          • SomervilleTom says

            May 20, 2021 at 11:43 pm

            Understood. It appears to me that it’s all theater. When people say that Google or Amazon are evil, it’s not a characterization of individual people (with the exception of Bill Gates 🙂 ) — it is, instead, a characterization of corporate action.

            I have no beef with any individual Chinese people, I refer instead to the various corporate actions of China.

            In any case, it doesn’t matter because I don’t think anybody in the lege cares one way or the other about China. My bottom line is that there is no political will to actually DO anything about public transportation in MA government.

            • jconway says

              May 23, 2021 at 7:38 pm

              I guess since they promised to build them in Springfield? I miss no politician and his push to get more state offices to Springfield which seems to be a better use of government resources than bribing casinos and communists to build jobs there instead. I’ll also add Springfields own Peter Pan is one of the biggest barriers to restoring inter-urban rail to that part of the state. Doing so could really open up that area to denser housing and young professionals like myself.

              My wife and I are increasingly seeing ourselves priced out of the inner 128 core, and we are quite literally in the middle federal bracket (which is itself in the top quarter of MA earners, most of whom earn far less than we do). Yet we also aren’t eager to make our commute any worse than it already is.

              • SomervilleTom says

                May 23, 2021 at 8:17 pm

                MA officials imposed a requirement that they built in Springfield on every bidder. The brute force approach didn’t work.

                It seems to me that relying on economic incentives to influence the behavior of a Chinese company is like relying on the instinct of self-preservation to stop a suicide bomber.

                Chinese companies are immune from the economic forces that drive other companies. The strategic imperatives of the state guide the behavior of Chinese companies — there is absolutely NO strategic imperative for China to improve public transportation in Massachusetts.

                If our government valued public transportation as much as it values missiles, bombers, fighters, ships, and all the associated hardware then we would be awash in fast, reliable, modern public transportation infrastructure.

                For generations, Americans told ourselves the myth that “the free market” and “competition” results in the best outcome for these various questions. The Chinese explicitly reject that myth.

                It appears to me that our transportation system and our healthcare system present compelling evidence that the “free market”, as practiced in America since the Reagan era, has been an abysmal failure.

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