HSR is just a willingness to say "fuck you" to people who want to hold up progress by refusing to sell land for any price, or who sue to stop a more environmentally-friendly transportation on the grounds of... <checks notes>... environmental impact.

Say what you will, but I don't consider eminent domain to be some kind of mystical technology that only wizards possess.

For automobiles, China didn't compete with the West on its own turf in heavily regulated markets. They embraced EVs from the beginning. Complex auto regulations can't save Europe because EVs are an end-run around all of the complexity of building an economical, low-polluting engine.

Indeed, Europe is talking about relaxing some of its environmental regulations for petrol cars, now that those regulations are more of a barrier to home companies than foreign ones.

High speed rail technology is not a secret. We in the US just don’t have the will. Auto technology in China was acquired via tech transfers. In order to open mfg in China foreign concerns were forced into partnerships with local companies; moreover there was an effort to obtain foreign trade secrets. Metallurgy for jet fans isn’t one of the technologies the west has tried to partner with China. At this time the UK, the US and Russia hold the lead in that technology -maybe France has some too.

> but they’re still complex, especially the internal combustion variants.

I'm not sure China is known for their ICE designs. Like Korea, I suspect China partially pushed hard for EV specifically because the complexity in a battery + motor system is meaningfully simpler than the ICE equivalent and there's relatively little overlap in many facets outside of some first principles.

Jet engines are like ICE, but with a very reliability threshold. ICE is already complicated, but OEMs will accept a certain deviation on reliability if they need to because occurence might be low and severity is manageable. Not so in jet engine design. A single failure is a big deal.