Not true of manufactured goods. China is the world's factory; but of services, like insurance and global banking, yes it is true. Even England provides more of these "paper work" services.
True China might be producing more manufactured goods than the US at the moment, while Western nations make a far greater proportion of their profits through services and "paper work", but those manufactured goods are specifically meant for Western markets, and only those Western markets are able to supply the services, in the quantities needed, to justify producing and selling those manufactured goods in the first place. Furthermore, innovation and cutting-edge industrial development continue to occur almost entirely in the West rather than in the People's Republic, whilst the latter focusses on using computers built with western technology, operating on a western-built information network, to try and steal those innovations in order to keep up.
Personally, to balance the market properly, I believe the US and allied nations must, in stages, begin to apply the same labour and environmental standards to imported goods as are applied to domestically-produced goods. Such policies would decisively tilt the economic playing field and force the Chinese government to reckon with the hundreds of millions of unfed masses who've been left behind by its economic leaps forward and the associated corruption and stagnation it's produced.
Also not true for goods and services in the market place. The "invisible hand" of Adam Smith, not the CCP, determines what is available there. China has far fewer permits and license required to open a new business than the US has - you just do it, if you think you can make a profit. You don't need a permit to cut some one's hair, sell soup,* or even to practice "traditional medicine" etc.
Not true; in order to open a major business in China and receive the necessary access to financing and government infrastructure, you need to have friends inside the Communist party; that's why so many Chinese entrepreneurs go abroad to make their fortunes rather than tapping the booming market at home. Deregulation occurs in China precisely where regulation is most needed, to deal with quacks, frauds and chronic industrial polluters. You think it's beneficial for a society and its economy if quack doctors are free to sell crushed rhino penis as an alternative cure for cancer? Oh and for the record it was centralized, poorly-planned government attempts at modernizing China's medical system which flooded it with all those quack doctors in the first place; Mao sent them off to medical school hoping they'd learn something useful, but most of the students just learned to wear a lab coat while sticking with their traditional non-empirical nonsense.
You are correct, when it comes to making major long-term investments. They are centrally planned. High capital cost things like high-speed rail, new ports, the N/S water transfer project, new cities, subways, dams, power plants. etc.
No, my point was that many major investments are NOT centrally-planned. Private companies are just as capable as governments (and often vastly more so) in identifying future needs and market demands, and the free market provides plentiful mechanisms for financing viable projects even when they take several decades and tens of billions of dollars to complete. The major difference is that in private industry, those who are good at what they do thrive, grow and evolve, while those who can't adapt to changing circumstances lose their market capitalization. In public industry, tax payers are milked to cover for any cost over-runs or other forms of mismanagement, rather than axing the elected officials responsible (aside from a token fall-guy who's usually only partly responsible).
Even when the US government goes forward with a massive project of its own, dating back to the times of Eli Whitney and the birth of the industrial revolution, it traditionally outsources its projects to local geniuses and lets them come up with sink-or-swim solutions to the assigned problems, rather than handing out buckets of cash to select government friends. Being a Canadian citizen myself, I can give you more than enough examples of massive centrally-planned government spending going to utter waste, while the most successful long-term projects in the country (such as the still-profitable oilsands industry) have been funded on private initiatives, with local governments practically bragging about their lack of involvement on the business end.
Also not true, even now, on a passenger mile basis. Trains are very energy efficient compared to airplanes and can deliver 40 or so more passenger miles with the same energy expended! But in the future when China, which is the world leader alternative energy systems installed each year, uses much less fossil energy, China's trains will be more than 100 times more environmentally friendly than US's airplanes for city to city travel (per passenger mile delivered).
High speed trains might pollute less than aircraft, but if they're running on coal-fired electricity, they're generating enormous sums of pollution all the same. Even if China builds nuclear, solar, wind or hydro plants to power those trains, that means other applications requiring those energy sources will have to turn to fossil fuels instead. In any case, the important thing is that you've got a lot of "will be's" in your statements, and they're still a very long way off (possibly even generations) from being "is" statements.
China uses "post-regulation." If, for example, the soup you sell uses your grandmother's recipe, which has a tiny pinch of arsenic in it you will be OK, until a few customers begin to eat their lunch there every day. Soon the medical services will note that the new rash of arsenic illness patients all were regular customers at your restaurant. So it will be closed, and you heavily fined, if not do some jail time, and you will be bared from ever selling any food again. You are an anti-social danger to the community.
You actually think the people who commit those sorts of violations expect to be caught in the first place? Do you think a 25-year sentence for murder or rape isn't enough to deter the people who commit it, but tacking on an extra 10 years will surely make them think twice about it before they act?
If you do something really bad, like kill 16 or so babies with the toxic additive you added to your watered down milk so it tricks the tests. - Still shows the normal protein content, then you will pay with your life. Eight top executives who did that all were executed in less than a year - not after 25 years of court appeals, as in the US. At the major wholesale level, China does have safety standards, especially for food and electrical appliances, with inspections at the production and distribution centers - Sort of a much smaller "FDA" but "post regulation."
You forgot to note that when that famous baby milk scandal errupted, the first violation led to minor slaps on the wrists and heart-sworn promises from those same executives never to do it again. They only got executed the second time around because it was bringing bad publicity to the Party.
