A Chinese citizen born when the country completed its first expressway would— by the time she reached the legal driving age of eighteen in 2011– be able to drive on a highway system that surpassed the length of the US interstate system. By 2020, China had built a second batch of expressways that again totaled the length of the US system. The first expanse of highways took eighteen years to build; the second took half that time.

Cars quickly filled these roads. In 1990, there were half a million automobiles in the country; in 2024, there were 435 million, many of them electric. China didn’t just build cars and highways. It also built mass transit. From 2003 to 2013, Shanghai added as much subway track as the entire system in New York City. In 2025, fifty-one Chinese cities have subway lines, eleven of which are longer than New York’s. China now has a longer high-speed rail network than the rest of the work put together, ten times the length of Spain’s and Japan’s (second and third in the world, respectively). Sleek railcars in silver zooming on elevated bridges are telegenic things, their pictures adorning billboards and book covers. This system completes around two billion passenger trips each year.

The only US nuclear plant built in the twenty-first century took fifteen years and $30 billion. In August 2024, China’s nuclear authority approved construction of eleven new reactors, which are collectively expected to cost the same amount.

Never mind that China has gotten less growth from each unit of new investment since its big infrastructure binge of 2008. The Communist Party continues to build because it’s full of engineers and also because Marxist-Leninists don’t want to cede economic agency to the people.

China would be better off if it built less and built better. But we should also resist judging it by the standards of the United States, which is frankly underprovisioned in public infrastructure. Because there is perhaps one thing worse than an overactive state that can’t stop moving— and that is a state that can’t move at all.

Environmental reviews continue to delay renewable projects. In 2024, the United States had 42 megawatts of operational offshore wind production undergoing permitting review, most of which are waiting on environmental analyses to be completed. Meanwhile, China is building most of the world’s renewable energy. In 2023, while the United States added 6 gigawatts of new wind installations, China added 76. That year, China built two-thirds of the world’s wind and solar plants, as well as four times more than the rest of the G-7 group of rich countries put together.

The lawyerly society is great at protecting the wealthy. The engineering state has a limited tolerance for how long infrastructure can be held up. It’s barely imaginable that a group of wealthy people would be able to use legal means to force the cancellation of clean energy projects in China. If it is really going to be a climate emergency, then the rest of the world will need to move as fast as the engineering state.

And the focus on building is winning China some degree of support in developing countries as well.

Exporting China’s infrastructure is core to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), one of Xi’s signature initiatives. Chinese firms have taken their expertise in building roads, bridges, railways, tunnels, dams, and power plants abroad. And the sometimes also bring the sorts of surveillance systems and censorship tools that find eager customers among autocratic leaders. They have gone on a spending spree overseas, with $1 trillion worth of loans outstanding in 150 countries.