Mildly Infuriating

Much of the growth in China is entirely artificial and is basically a glorified jobs program. China builds tons of cities throughout the country to generate construction contracts and keep people employed. This trend has sort of recently reached a head, and China is now suffering from a pretty large youth unemployment rate (something like 15% of young adults in China cannot find work).

Additionally, many of the public transportation routes in China were designed as vanity projects and have never become profitable. A lot of the high speed rail in China cuts through large swathes of uninhabited land and goes out to ghost cities where nobody lives because they were only built to create construction contracts. These rail lines are expensive to maintain and are bleeding money.

Now, of course you'd probably say that public transportation is a public good; they dont need to profit to benefit the country. That may be true, but it also means that the government needs to borrow money in order to subsidize these largely pointless rail lines (think of those maps where people propose a HSR line that goes from New York to California- a largely pointless route that almost nobody would take because it would be a lot faster to just take a plane).

This is not to say that the United States beats China in every category. In my view the United States has become a barely functioning legal fiction on the precipice of disintegration. My point is just that a lot of these things in China are artificially propped up by their relatively centrally planned economy and are designed to feed the egos of politicians. China is coming up on multiple fiscal, economic, and demographic cliffs that will most likely result in the shuttering of lots of these public works projects similar to how Argentina has been forced to shut down large amounts of public services because of decades of poor economic management.

And finally, to be fair, the United States is ALSO coming up on many economic cliffs, and in many ways has already flung itself far off of some of them, resulting in deteriorating fundamental public services such as education, healthcare, housing, public transportation, and regulatory agencies, not to mention the corruption which has also infested all of those