I don't know if "forgotten" as used in the title is the correct word so much as just "out of practice." Look at this list of infrastructure projects in China in the last decade or so:
It's hard not to be impressed by that list. And China is undertaking these scale projects abroad as well from Latin America to Africa.
It's should be no surprise that you get really good at something the more you do it. What was the last project that the US Federal Government undertook on a similar scale as one of these? "The Big Dig[1]"? Notable for being the most expensive highway project in US history and yet served only Boston?
The US seems to spend interminable months squabbling over whether or not its un-American to use imported steel to replace parts of its crumbling infrastructure(see Bay Bridge, Tapan Zee projects etc.) while the Chinese seem to spend that time actually executing the project.
Another possibility is that development slows when you're spending Trillion dollars[1] on endless wars abroad instead of investing in infrastructure at home:
http://www.businessinsider.com/giant-chinese-infrastructure-...
It's hard not to be impressed by that list. And China is undertaking these scale projects abroad as well from Latin America to Africa.
It's should be no surprise that you get really good at something the more you do it. What was the last project that the US Federal Government undertook on a similar scale as one of these? "The Big Dig[1]"? Notable for being the most expensive highway project in US history and yet served only Boston?
The US seems to spend interminable months squabbling over whether or not its un-American to use imported steel to replace parts of its crumbling infrastructure(see Bay Bridge, Tapan Zee projects etc.) while the Chinese seem to spend that time actually executing the project.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dig