Then I saw a picture of that same train station five years later. It was in the middle of a metropolis. China has so much housing that there are entire cities sitting empty.

When an entire city is sitting empty, there won’t be scandals over, say, stolen concrete and other embezzlement meaning that buildings are less reliable than they should be, maybe lacking elevators while having them on paper, or plumbing, or heating, or what not, or the city plan being impractical for the actual situation of many people living there (bottlenecks for transport and pedestrians alike or something like that).

Also the place where it’s been built may just not be feasible to live in.

People in the West are very gullible to fairy tales, like calling a despotic cleptocratic bureaucracy “meritocracy” and expecting it to lack the downsides of what they are used to without lacking the advantages.

But this

The Americans all laughed at China for it.

was, of course, wrong. Even if the state does nothing about it except selling land and permits for construction, a working train station in some place allowing to get to a big city reasonably fast would very soon mean lots of life around it.

It’s human, some things decay, other things take their place to decay later, and so on.

It’s not as much about names and political ideologies as it is about power of various groups and principles.