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This was not a supplier, it was our own factory. Scrapping or reworking parts is burning our own money.
In that sense we had more leverage over external suppliers in that they had to be in spec or we could reject their parts and it is their problem if that makes them lose money.
We had a major customer reject a large order of a part due to it being out of spec. It was a disaster. I was on a plane within a few days.
A bit of googling claims Chinese HSR is not financially sustainable and survives on taxpayer funding and hundreds of billions of dollars in debt. But that's true for other HSR projects and not a particularly Chinese issue. Planes are just too fast and cheap and HSR way too expensive for HSR to make financial sense.
The issue with Chinese HSR is that it became a sort of flagship national pride / soft power / foreign influence vector during the post-2008 stimulus period.
For various (mostly American-adjacent) geopolitical-meets-green reasons, high speed rail became an international symbol of being a 'modern' and 'advanced' country, particularly because the Americans weren't into it. (For pretty sound economic reasons, but that doesn't stop good propaganda.) Building more and more HSR was not only a quote-unquote 'easy' way to beat the US at a metric of global prestige, but it was a complimentary infrastructure investment with the construction boom and the early Belt-and-Road infrastructure project wave (and thus a Chinese jobs program / influence investment overseas). China was a Train Power who could spare trains and track for a reasonable price and no strings attached* (*terms and conditions apply), and all that.
The issue on the domestic front was that the construction boom was a bubble, and the dynamics of the Chinese system that led to ghost cities also led to high speed rail to those sort of ghost city projects, even though the fundamental issue- like in a lot of places- is the human geography dispersion. People need movement within cities, or from suburbs to cities, more than they need movement between cities.
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