Maybe we need to redefine rational.

In China, one gets the sense that urban planning has arrived home at last, to claim its throne. There are major museums dedicated to urban planning in prestigious locations in Shanghai and Beijing. You go inside and there are huge exhibits dedicated to comprehensive planning, historic preservation, transportation, insane levels of detail about plan implementation, 3-D mini-models and virtual flythroughs. And you see it outside the museums, too. Everywhere you go, the visions of planners are being implemented. Over 30 new subway systems are opening in China in the next five years. New towns cut from whole cloth are popping up on the landscape. With environmental planning now an issue, huge water and air cleanup projects are being accomplished. The Big Dig in Boston took God knows how many years and was billions over budget. China don't play like that.

As the economic, housing, and land reforms barrel forward, though, one gets the sense that more than just per capita GDP is changing. Though we have this image of the state being in total control, there are signs that the newly-rich, family-connected, bribe-dispensing factory owners and developers created by these reforms are running the show now. Or maybe it's that the show has new producers. Where once a blunt Marxist rationality ruled the day, it's no longer clear what the state is thinking. For example, let's look at what's happening in Beijing with all the growth. Lots of in-migration, and with the land reforms a lot of housing being built by private developers. The land is still owned by the state, and leased to the developers, so the government still has control. But now they have a financial incentive to redefine rationality from the socialist definition, serving the people, to the neoclassical economics definition, maximizing utility (and what is more useful than cash?). You can see it happening right before your eyes when you ride the Beijing subway:


Lines 1, 2, and 13 have been built so far. Don't ask where lines 3 - 12 are. And just look at line 13 there (yellow), looping around like some kind of drunken snake. The land use development is so out of control that the transportation planning process, which is controlled by engineers, not politicians or shamans, has gone cuckoo.

All this makes the dire predictions about China taking over the world while the US decays into irrelevance and mediocrity a little less scary, though it's still scary that China is the #1 buyer of US debt (Treasury bills). They aren't perfect robots over here, they have problems just like you and me. Now the response to that might be to think that if China's problems get out of control, it will cause an apocalypse. I want to reassure everyone that I have met many determined, capable people here who are dedicated to sustainability and understand very well that there are both good and bad lessons to be learned from the US. They are taking notes and working hard. Remember at all times that we are talking about the country that can accomplish this: