Theoretically you’re right. But having read the book, I agree with the general thesis. Things just move so much faster in China when it comes to making or building anything. Like I know firsthand people whose towns were converted from run-of-the-mill village to a T2 city in the span of a couple of decades. When hundreds of millions of people experience major change in their lives in front of their eyes, it’s a nit different than waiting for 5 years to start a new bridge across the river. I’m not even talking about factories, or policy course-corrections, or long-term goal settings either.
You can make a lot of arguments in this debate, but in terms of speed and execution, there’s a clear winner.
Faster is something of an arbitrary standard because speed is almost always a trade off with efficiency. A lot of China's speed comes down to cheap labor and inefficiently allocated capital.
Every 6 months of US health spending above OECD baseline i.e. ~8% of GDP, aka ~2T/y buys you the entire HSR network in China, stations included. How inefficient is PRC capital allocation really? A few 10s of millions of extra housing units when they have 200-300m more people to urbanize? The point is PRC over allocates but quickly readjusts, i.e. even housing allocation basically capped in 2010s when new floor space peaked. The even more important point is PRC thinks it's important to over allocate and have in abundance than to have not enough. I argue most would prefer problems of over allocated abundance over under allocated scarcity.
Like US has plenty of cheap labour (mexicans), they just choose to exploit it maximally in some sectors (like agriculture), and partially (like construction), vs maybe maximally exploiting cheap labours in the latter would do US some good.
We can keep using that excuse, but the reality is they're building, uplifting millions of people (obviously with some problems, but with the idea of "for the greater good"), and going forward with technology. Also, labour is actually not that cheap in China, compared to a decade+ ago.
On the same note, if we only talk about high speed rails, Spain has built up quite a network as well. Not as fast as China, but still. Labour isn't cheap over there at all, but seems like they figured some stuff out.
Its easier to upgrade a city when you can just move people out of their house. In the west its a nightmare to get anything changed because people own their spot and dont want to leave.
China moves so fast that by the time knowledge gets back to the West it’s often outdated. So my info should be checked.
But as I understand it China has been famous for “nail houses” - homes from which the owner refuses to move out, causing all kinds of headaches.
It isn’t a lawless place and the Party / local government doesn’t have carte blanche. There is nuance that’s worth considering before making blanket statements.
Yeah, people keep saying that Chinese build wherever they want to, whenever they want to. It's just not really true. It's correct that there are less bureaucracy (less environmental analysis, less consultation and etc.), but people still go and protest in their local areas when something happens that they don't like. There are people that don't move, but their lives become increasingly harder when they don't, because everyone else might take the money and go forward.
Sometimes it's also the opposite, the local government fight for the new build ups, so they can get the money and investments in. Or block development through their areas when there is no real reason to allow it (think of rails but with no stops there).
You can make a lot of arguments in this debate, but in terms of speed and execution, there’s a clear winner.