I think self enrichment on public projects is a thing anywhere public projects happen. The difference is that in the US it is often the only goal due to the politics involved with creating budgets which often result in bartering silly little projects to make this or that representative vote along. The problem with this is that these small uncoordinated efforts serve no bigger strategy. It's literally nothing more than a photo opportunity for some politician to look good just in time for his next election.
China seems really good at coming up with long term strategies and then executing them over the course of a few decades. The US used to have that ability but seems to have lost that. The highways and railways of the US were built in a very different era where such things were needed and people got tasked with getting things done on an epic scale. A bit like China is today maybe.
China deployed massive amounts of infrastructure over the past few decades. That was intentional and probably made a lot of people very wealthy as a side effect of getting that job done. Maybe not all of that is as effective and there definitely is somewhat of a debt bubble around this.
The fix in the US and Europe is to make public spending on these things sexy again and to stop relying on contractors that are in it for funneling as much public funds to their own pockets as they possibly can. Big government haters have been good at scaling down government, which used to get things done inefficiently but at least got them done and is now simply not getting things done at all. The market did not step in to do it better and when it did get involved, it optimized for profit and enrichment instead of results. Probably by most objective standards this is less efficient from a tax dollar point of view as it is a lot more expensive and the results are decidedly underwhelming.
Here in Berlin, the new airport is a good example of inept politicians making some contractors and themselves very rich while not getting the job done for nearly a decade past its original opening date in 2012, before it became clear that there was not going to be an opening two weeks before the planned date. Especially, when you consider that it is supposed to replace two existing airports that were built with a minimum of fuss and cost in the cold war era when airports simply got built when politicians decided they wanted one. E.g. Tegel, one of the current airports got constructed in 90 days in 1948 to support the Berlin airlift and still serves much of the traffic in Berlin (way more than it was ever intended to be able to handle). Planning for the new airport started in 1996 and it's still unclear if they are actually opening as planned in 2021.