When I travelled to China for the first time I've spent one month there travelling across the entire country via their highspeed train network. It's amazing, all major places are so well connected and the trains are really cheap, offer 1st, 2nd, 3rd and business class acommodating all various budgets and comfort styles and they run really smoothly and are amazingly on time! After departure it doesn't take more than a…
Having lived and worked in China for several years recently, and continuing to regularly visit, I agree with almost everything you said except for the "huge efforts in creating a fair [...] system for everyone". I saw no evidence of any such effort to create a fair system. For example, China's rule of law is effectively driven by power and connections, not on evidence and fairness, and the effect of this extends thro…
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> I saw no evidence of any such effort to create a fair system.
As fast as China is developing, it takes more than a few years of a snapshot expat life in a tier1-2 city to appreciate the scale of uplifting. The evidence is everywhere if are familiar with Chinese development goals and rate progress in context of the Chinese system where inequity and corruption are both intentional and deliberate development strategies.
Inequity: Deng wanted to direct development of coast regions first to rapidly cultivate an economic model (all the SEZs). The lessons learned would be used to improve the interior. The goal is to become a "moderately prosperous society" by 2021 with per capita GDP of $10,000 (current forecast is $12,000), followed by complete urbanization and poverty alleviation by 2030, followed by "China Dream" of per capita GDP of $40,000 by 2050. Some of the coastal cities are currently at $20,000 or $40,000 by PPP.
The system is working as intended, the big current efforts is to redirect coastal manufacturing and wealth into interior development which has "unfairly" languished, but as someone who spend a decade travelling between tier1 and county level (i.e too backwater to even be on the tier system) in the 90s, there's been improvements in aggregate everywhere. It may feel uneven depending on time and place but the trend is undeniable.
Corruption: to preserve the political narrative of "socialist economy", corruption was a mechanism used to transfer state resources to meritocratically selected local party officials that was still beholden to the goal of development and growth to ensure future promotions. This is why corruption has bad in India, Russia, Indonesia, Ukraine, etc but good in China. China is the only country where increased corruption is correlated to increased growth. This is posited by Yukon Huang, former World Bank director for China, Russia, and Former Soviet Union Republics. Power and connections only go so far (and sometimes too far), but most low tier bureaucratic arise through performance. They're welcome to gaft a little on the side but they better build X new residential units, Y infrastructure to meet Z urbanization goals.
E: It's not perfect, especially rule of law, but these institutions usually take a long time to build. Somethings can be rushed (construction), somethings can't (integration), but it's China, despite perceived "patience" of Chinese grand strategy, they'll try to rush things anyway (love them 5,10,15 year plans), frequently it's unethical, sometimes it'll backfire, but moving this fast is an unending series of trolley problems with 1.4 billion lives. Overall, IMO they're doing well. Prioritizing elimination of poverty at the expense of some corruption and inequity is the correct short-term moral calculus for me. And it's not like they're not trying to address the latter (anticorruption, HK etc).