China moves fast. They move fast to build rail, to build cities, and to intern people.

NYC learned the lessons when we went through something much (much!) smaller with Robert Moses destroying huge swathes of the city, so now doing anything takes forever. That's a feature of representative government - I get to complain about the new bike lane bioswale design, and they have to listen. This is slow. They don't have the same official processes in China, so they are fast, in both wonderful and horrible things.

Concentration camps aren't a step "backwards": they've been used in pretty much all modern societies. They did not exist before the modern era (say, 1800), and are a thoroughly modern phenomenon.