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CCP was trying to boost their global awareness, visibility and respect as a technology leader or at least fast follower, and for the 1.4B they spent (cheap and I’m SURE subsidized by the Germans to some extent) they got their monies worth.
The technology advance by installing a working, dependable commercial train seems to have no parallel anywhere else. For the Chinese sponsors and builders, as well as the German developers the learning has been vary valuable.
From a practical daily perspective there is obvious value side many people, including me, have travelled there specifically to visit the operating train. That obviously does not given overt cost/benefit justification but:
China now has a national network of fast trains that surpasses any other part of the world. Investing money in any potentially precedence-breaking technology is part of the current Chinese psyche. Similarly their major airports are nearly all state-of-the-art. Denigrating spending resources on new technology experimentation is strange, especially coming from aficionados of Tesla and SpaceX, as nearly all of us are.
China welcomed Tesla because of technology transfer, as everyone knew (or should have known). Elon Musk knew that and also knew Tesla could benefit from the reverse also, as is transparently obvious from excellent relationship with CATL and, apparently, BYD too, not to mention the many Chinese suppliers.
There is room for disagreement on the net benefits to Tesla from all this, although the ones we hear the most are political objections. Still, where else in the world could the German Maglev developers hope to have a commercial operating test? Where else could Tesla have built and operated a giant factory so quickly and efficiently?
