BEIJING—Addressing the National People’s Congress about the pressing need to drastically lower standards, President Xi Jinping worried Thursday that the United States was outpacing China on poorly functioning low-speed trains. “If something is not done quickly, China risks falling hopelessly behind America in the amount of barely operational and incredibly slow railways,” said President Xi, explaining that at both the city and regional level, China was falling decades behind in the number of delayed schedules, derailments, and train crashes that the U.S. experiences on an annual basis. “Meanwhile, as we’ve built all this high-speed train infrastructure, we are in jeopardy of losing the race to have thousands of miles of tracks that don’t work. The U.S. is also leaps and bounds ahead in terms of creating train lines that bypass major cities, rendering travel extremely difficult. China must do much worse as a country.” At press time, Xi laid out a plan to surpass America not only by investing in poorly made trains but innovating by developing lines that go off cliffs in and straight into oceans.