> Where in the US can one find the secret, cross-country high-speed rail built in the roaring twenties?!

Nowhere because the USA has an excellent internal flight and interstate highway system instead. Railways were already becoming uncompetitive by the 1920s and now live on mostly in parts of the world where they already exist, where land is at a premium.

The reason people think China will crash is that their system isn't unique, has been tried many times before and eventually always fails. That isn't circular reasoning, it's reasoning based on prior experience. China is still a communist country: we know how that story ends and why. Remember that for much of the history of the USSR people in the west were dazzled by its rapid industrialization and apparent achievements. First country to put a man in space! Many people in that era genuinely wondered if central planning was just a superior way to do things. In hindsight we can say that it wasn't: with enormous focus such economies were able to pull off heavy engineering projects at scale, but at the cost of ignoring consumer goods and with a dysfunctional economy that was brittle to its core.

End result: when Yeltsin visited NASA in the 1980s he demanded a surprise inspection of a local supermarket. NASA didn't impress him, but the 30,000+ products for sale in a mundane shop blew him away. He was shaken to his core and cried on the flight home, asking himself what they had done to Russia's poor people. The USSR collapsed just a few years later, Yeltsin became president and moved Russia in the direction of a market economy.

From an East Asian perspective what China is doing really isn't anything new and with the same pitfalls as the former Asian tigers.

>our system is the best because we're the best, because of the system we have.

This isn't what's happening at all. The causes and reasons why infrastructure and Western cities are so bad have been studied for decades and are well known, just as we've been studying what makes Tokyo or Hong Kong work so well. People are constantly critiquing the underlying system of incentives and entangled interests, you can hundreds of popular threads on HN, Reddit, MSM, hell even with Elon Musk's DOGE.

The only time when I see the mythical self-convinced westerner evoked is precisely when critique of other cultures come in, often from cultures that feel a need to constantly defend themselves.

You don’t have to apologize, man. I was on a Pullman train once but it wasn’t quite a bullet train. I also rode a Western train named Orient Express.

People forget that China existed before communism. Hell only Mao's idiotic experiment only lasted a few decades. China has always been capitalist. It's why you can find a store run by Chinese expats in the middle of the Suriname jungle.