When China's first high-speed rail system completed its first test-run in June 2008 it was 75 per cent over budget, but was hailed in the Chinese media as an achievement worthy of national pride. Liu described his achievement as having created a network with a comprehensive system involving indigenous Chinese intellectual property. He stated that China had created a high-speed railway system that had the "greatest comprehensive technology, best integrative ability, highest operational distance, fastest operational speed, and largest scale of construction" in the world. (In reality the rail system was largely based on German and Japanese designs). Shortly after Liu's completion of China's first high-speed rail line, in the autumn of 2008, the Chinese government more than doubled Liu's ministry's budget (as part of an effort to combat global recession), and gave him the responsibility laying ten thousand miles of high-speed rail track by 2020: five times the size of America's first transcontinental route. By 2010 Liu's budget was over one hundred billion dollars (US). In 2011, the American president, Barack Obama, cited Liu's high-speed rail system as evidence that American infrastructure was no longer the best in the world.