China high-speed rail total km

Bullet trains in Sichuan and pub lager in Manchester, on the same upward slope. The man pouring the pint has no opinion on Chinese infrastructure spending. The track engineer in Chengdu has never heard of a Wetherspoon. The trend insists they are colleagues anyway.

China's high-speed rail network ballooned from about eight thousand kilometres in 2010 to over forty thousand by 2023, the largest infrastructure programme in the world. The British pint, meanwhile, climbed in price thanks to a quietly unrelated combination of Brexit-era input costs, energy shocks, and progressively higher beer duty. Both are creatures of inflation, broadly defined: one in concrete, one in barley. They share a slope because the years between 2010 and 2023 lifted almost everything that gets measured in money.

Two countries solving different problems in the same currency of years. Most charts that climb together are just inflation in costume.