Alice Han

This seems like a similar thing.

Although I think the difference is that you have to pay to use this as opposed to what they do in Hong Kong, right?

So I'm glad you raised that because I would have taken a completely economics perspective of it as opposed to historical and cultural, which is to say that embedded in the modern society

Chinese system is the incentive structure for local governments to have these vanity infrastructure projects that they can point to, right, especially ahead of the big party congress in October 2027.

You know, there's an incentive for these party secretaries in each province, in this case Chongqing, to point to these big infrastructure projects that they successfully led

that raise China's profile globally, but also employ people.

They generate GDP.

Now we can debate whether or not it's efficient or inefficient use of funding to make these infrastructure projects.

Some of them end up not being used and end up turning into ghost cities, for instance.

But certainly, I think it makes sense at the locality level to be doing these infrastructure projects in order to get promoted in the next party congress, right?

That was my first instinct when I saw this, which is that this is a party secretary and a network of officials that are doing this big project so that they can get promoted next year.

But your point about gigantism in Chinese culture...

Certainly, I think that there is this desire to break records, right?

You saw that in the Olympic Games in terms of the biggest number of performers during one of the Olympic ceremonies.

And China, obviously, until very recently, was the most populous country in the world.

So there's also this feeling that things need to be bigger, right, to...

Especially if they're charging people 40 cents per trip.

They said over the Spring Festival, 400,000 people, that's like $200,000 a pop for the Spring Festival.

So maybe the ROI on that escalator is better than a skyscraper.

Maybe that's the...