The critique of US infrastructure is misleading. The system is excellent and highly optimized for one lifestyle: suburban car ownership. The problem is its failure to provide viable alternatives like high-speed rail and efficient urban transit, not its inherent quality.
The American suburban ideal of a yard, a dog, and local control is impossible in China. The Communist Party's need for social control and policies mandating food self-sufficiency near cities ensures dense apartment living remains the norm.
Unlike American businesses focused on financial metrics, Chinese business leaders often aim for market dominance. This explains their willingness to invest heavily in long-term projects and infrastructure without immediate concern for high profits.
China's economic success is driven by a small, hyper-competitive private sector (the top 5%). This masks a much larger, dysfunctional morass of state-owned enterprises, leading to declining overall capital productivity despite headline-grabbing advances.
Applying James C. Scott's concept of "Zomia," Southwest China and its mountainous surroundings are best understood as a historical refuge for peoples escaping state power. This shaped their unique agricultural, social, and cultural practices designed for evasion.
To master writing, one should physically copy out well-written articles, similar to how a music student transcribes a composer's score. This practice forces an intimate understanding of the author's choices in syntax, rhythm, and sentence structure.
Unlike the West, China never developed constraints on imperial power because there was no independent church or landed aristocracy to challenge the emperor. The state captured the entire intellectual class through its exam system, preventing checks and balances from forming.
The CCP's durability stems from studying and combining disparate models: the Catholic Church's hierarchical doctrine, the Sicilian Mafia's code of silence (omerta), and a rigorous analysis of the Soviet Union's collapse to ensure its own survival.
This framework contrasts China's top-down, control-oriented approach (e.g., one-child policy, zero-COVID) with the American focus on individual rights and legal process, explaining their divergent development paths and societal structures.
While US cities have infrastructure flaws, America's true strength is creating the world's most desirable suburbs, where people report being happiest. This lifestyle model is a key cultural feature that China's control-oriented system cannot replicate.