Just Build It
You arrive in a Chinese city and the first thing you notice isn’t the skyline. It’s the momentum. The place feels like it’s growing - cranes everywhere, concrete curing, rebar like bamboo shoots. Whole districts under active assembly.
Back home, we treat building like a morality play. First we ask: Can we build it? Engineers run the numbers, architects sketch the dream, someone produces a glossy PDF full of hopeful arrows. We prove it’s possible.
Then we hit the swamp: Should we build it?
That "should" is where projects go to die. Economic objections. Environmental objections. Social objections. Political objections. Then the real killers: process and delay — the endless opportunities for anyone with time and a motive to apply the brakes. We've built a culture where stopping something is often easier than finishing it — we don’t just debate outcomes, we litigate the right to change anything at all.
In China, the process goes like so:
Can we build it?
Yes.
Build it.
In China, power has often been tied to delivery. Build the road. Build the rail. Build the airport. Make the lights stay on. Move people. Move goods. "Build it and they will come" is applied constantly, and yes, sometimes it fails (see the famous ghost cities), but generally it's proven true.
Scale helps. When your unit of measurement is "millions", the maths changes. A subway line isn’t a boutique upgrade; it’s plumbing. A high-speed rail network isn’t a pet project; it’s an artery. Costs that look absurd in a country of five million start to look almost logical when you can amortise them across hundreds of millions of riders over decades. Big moves become, not cheap, but defensible. The demand is there. The density is there. The usage arrives like gravity.
And then there’s the culture of access. In the West, we gatekeep wonder with effort. The real view is the one you "earned" with sweat. There’s romance in climbing the mountain for the viewpoint. China often takes the opposite approach: make it accessible. Elevators, cable cars, boardwalks, viewing platforms — even escalators tunnelled through the rock up a sacred mountain. The mountain becomes a public park with infrastructure. The sublime gets a restaurant and a snack stall.
It can feel crass if you’re trained to worship "pristine". It can also feel ironically democratic. The elderly couple, the kid, everyone gets the photo. Little Red Book turns destinations into a catalogue of angles, a factory of curated memory. The experience becomes replicable. You don’t leave with dirt under your nails; you leave with proof you were there.
The uncomfortable truth is that every society chooses where it wants friction. Put it up front and you risk paralysis. Remove it and you risk cruelty, waste, and social harm.
Maybe the goal is to recover the ability to build—housing, transit, energy, resilience—without turning "should" into a permanent hiding place. To keep the moral question alive, but not let it become an alibi for doing nothing.
Because the world doesn’t pause while we argue. And concrete, for better or worse, is one of the few languages that actually changes what happens next.