This is a horrible attitude to have. You're telling them that rather than push their country to be the best it can be, they should accept it for what it is and move if they don't like it? That's not what America is about my friend.
China, due to the nature of the country, has options at it's disposal that the US does not. Norway, the socialist paradise (where I live) , also does not have high speed rail BTW.
Yet "socialist" leaning countries like Spain, Germany, France, and Sweden do have high speed rail.
Sure, China's cheaper labor makes it easier for them to build out HSR quickly and affordably, but your implication that you need to be an authoritarian country for HSR to be feasible isn't accurate.
The lack of HSR in the US is due to several reasons. High construction costs, the fact that many cities are very spread out and cheaply served by domestic flights, and my earlier comment about NIMBYs blocking construction because they don't want it running through their farms.
I'm not a fan of regimes that concentrate religious minorities in camps, enforce an ideological form of social engineering through "social credit", harvest organs on an industrial scale, or disappear people for having views out of step with dear leader Winnie the Pooh. Rather, I feel a profound sense of disappointment at the sight of an America that used to move mountains and earth to improve the human condition, and, at a time of historically unprecedented aggregate wealth, productivity, and technological advancement, finds itself unable or unwilling to commit itself to the sorts of enterprises that less fortunate nations have no problem undertaking.
This is partially because the improvements you mention come from the private sector while the things that you miss usually done by government (at the very least the framework). US has a long history of crony capitalism or corporatism and as a result no real general public health care, public transportation and so on. It also does not help that different states have different regulations in many cases.
