While it has invested infrastructure, the scale of its investment does not equate to the US - it vastly, vastly overshadows it. The nature of its infrastructure investment: centralist planning under socialist leadership, is also nothing like US robber-baron driven development. Modern China's urbanization has been nothing less than the largest human migration in history. The infrastructure went from the odd railroad with a few urbanized cities to fiber optic internet, 5G data, high speed trains and airports everywhere in the country within ~30 years. 1.4 billion people have cell phones, flatscreen TVs, instant messaging, e-vehicles and streaming movies.
But now the bubble has burst. Growth has slowed. Factories are closing, or heavily automating with world-leading levels of technical integration, cutting headcounts. The educated youth are unemployed. International investment has dried up. Rumours abound that the party leadership is in crisis with factional schisms and high profile coverups, and the national pension fund has been emptied. Chinese with money seek to escape by moving their families overseas. The specter of the party looms over remnant private industry seeking a tax to aide its flailing coffers. Everyone recognizes the education system is terrible and seeks to send their kids overseas. A fledgeling venture capital industry, once buoyant, has seized, and while domestic remittance is ~free and ~instantaneous international financial remittance is heavily regulated. But everyone can watch the latest Hollywood, Bollywood or Chinese content. Wealthy young Chinese can obtain information from across the country in seconds and access drugs like cocaine, ecstasy, ketamine, and marijuana, drive Teslas or Ferraris and wield iPhones. Everyone in the cities has a VPN on their phone to get foreign content. AI's potential to accelerate further change looms large.
How is this anything like the US in the 19th century, an era before even broadcast media? This to me seems a frankly ridiculous assertion. Modern China is nothing like anything that has ever happened before, in terms of technology, political ideology, or economy. At best, weak parallels can be drawn along constrained axes, but the big picture is totally unknown to history. I only hope for the people's sake the current situation can be resolved without civil war. And indeed such wishes should be extended globally, as in the current era, the UK, the US, parts of western Europe and even my native Australia could be said to have the socioeconomic preconditions for civil war. Let us not see another world war in our lifetime. Let us not be blinded by nationalism.
Nationalism is an infantile disease: the measles of mankind - Einstein, who also incidentally, it should be highlighted, was himself a globalist-humanist and turned down the presidency of Israel considering Zionism a self-destructive political ideology...