When the key criteria for leadership selection is alignment with a specific ideology, and that ideology is defined by a specific person, it's almost tautological that said person will end up in charge for as long as they'd like to be.
Any elections in the People's Republic of China occur under a one-party authoritarian political system controlled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
It's not the same, and as a consequence of being one-party; means (like the parent suggests) they can be more long term focused, which seems to be working.
There is some low hanging fruit, like the ticketing system.
Might be possible to improve satisfaction without costly infrastructure upgrades by ensuring you have a seat for long trips and being more aggressive with discounts at quiet times.
Plenty of times I’ve been one of like 30 people on a 12 car train despite the ticket having cost £60. The train is going to run anyway, so may as well price more aggressively.
I mean there’s pretty low hanging fruit mentioned in the article. If rail strikes are frequent enough to feature in the formula, end the strikes by paying the workers well.
And the average UK citizen seems to have a huge problem with that, but seems to be completely happy with private train company executives getting paid obscene amounts and train companies paying out huge dividends when the services are so bad.
Why do people resent train drivers getting paid well?
When train workers demanded inflationary pay maintenance the highest train driver pay was splashed all over the media in an attempt to get workers to hate one another and ignore the execs and shareholders walking off with all the money.
There shouldn't be any money to walk off with whilst services are more expensive and less good than most other countries.
Creating a market for a natural monopoly like train travel should always include simulated competition against other remote geographies (ie. France), and financial penalties for losing that competition.