instead they innovate!
remember, some ppl like to say japan is 1/10th pop of china yet more
technologically advanced!

in my views, your camp/philo is no good at all!
these were huge national projects:
- 3 gorges dam
- qinghai/tibet trains: solving permafrost problems, and created new
technologies, hundreds of them!
- new long bridges in china spanning the seas etc.
- new nuclear tech for power generation
- green tech.
- space tech: has already created hundreds of new or related tech.

all of the above have 1 thing in common: it is a 1-way OUTCOME, that is
a success!

had china gone ahead with its own home grown hs trains, it would have
achieved great success and generated hundreds new technologies!

regarding equal footing with other countries.. i disagree.
as a matter of fact, i kind of sided with the foreign companies
complaining about china modifying their techs and then created a "new"
or "better" tehc and then claimed they are now china's own, and even
be ready to export to other countries, yet pay no royalties to those
foreigh companies core tech.
there was a long article in nyt or bloomberg or something about
kawasaki, german companies complaining about this.

the RIGHT way to do is do a Manhattan-like project..

and we can learn a lot from the korean version!

read about it