Mao Zedong once called for building socialism in a “more, faster, better, and more frugal” way. Mao launched dozens of political movements, including the Great Leap Forward, which produced the worst famine in human history, costing at least 30 million lives.
Megaprojects functioned as visual proof of state competence and resolve, regardless of whether they met genuine social or economic needs. Their speedy completion–however irrational–was always safer than restraint in the Party’s political lexicon.
In recent decades, the PRC’s infrastructure drive has served as another kind of movement: a theater of political legitimacy cast in steel and concrete. Officials are rewarded for what can be seen and counted–kilometers laid, stations opened, ribbons cut–not for long-term performance or social return. Modernity is reduced to appearance: skylines, high-speed rail, and monumental bridges.
Whether a region actually needs a high-speed rail station becomes secondary to whether it has one. Its absence signals political lag; its presence signifies loyalty. Under this logic of governance, feasibility studies, environmental assessments, and professional caution are treated as obstruction–or even disloyalty–once a top leader has made up his mind.
Laozi warned that excess does not create order, but burden, distortion, and eventual reversal. Yet under the CCP, expansion is often treated as proof of strength: more expressways, more high-speed rail lines, more new districts, more monumental projects. From a Daoist perspective, however, this logic is inverted. What is excessive does not remain productive. What is forced does not remain stable.
Xiong’an is perhaps the clearest illustration of Xi Jinping’s anti-wuwei megaproject mentality. Announced in 2017 as a new area of national significance and repeatedly invoked alongside Shenzhen and Pudong, it embodied the belief that political command could summon a great city into existence by sheer force of state will.
Yet nearly a decade later, Xiong’an’s growth still depends heavily on administrative relocation–universities, hospitals, and state-owned enterprises shifted out of Beijing–rather than on the organic clustering of private capital, entrepreneurial energy, and market opportunity that made Shenzhen and Pudong succeed. Publicly reported cumulative investment had already reached about 835.4 billion yuan by February 2025.
Rather than adapting to existing flows of people, capital, geography, and commerce, the project attempts to override them. Xiong’an was built in the Baiyangdian basin, a low-lying, flood-prone environment that has required major ecological and flood-control interventions.
The deeper issue, then, is why the state chose to impose monumental ambition on a landscape that demanded caution, adaptation, and restraint.
In Daoist terms, Xiong’an is not the triumph of vision, but the overreach of compulsion. It seeks to create a Shenzhen without Hong Kong and a Pudong without Shanghai: a city called into being first by decree, then by subsidy, then by administrative transfer. It shows how far a Chinese leader can push resources, institutions, and propaganda in defiance of organic development–and how difficult it is to command the spontaneous social vitality that genuine flourishing requires.
Xiong’an reveals the central flaw of Xi Jinping’s anti-wuwei governance: political power can order relocation, finance construction, and choreograph spectacle, but it cannot command the natural emergence of a living city.
China’s glittering expressways and high-speed rail system offer another example of anti-wuwei governance. By the end of 2024, China had built more than 190,000 kilometers of expressway and nearly 48,000 kilometers of high-speed rail, the largest networks in the world. But their very scale also reveals the logic of overcommand.
Instead of responding to organic flows of people, commerce, and settlement, these infrastructures were often built in response to state targets, political ambition, and the conviction that construction itself would generate demand.
Even as China State Railway’s liabilities rose to about 6.2 trillion yuan by the end of 2024, the system continued to expand, including into places where stations were located far from population centers and where passenger demand outside peak periods remained limited.
Instead of following the natural movement of society and capital, the state repeatedly tries to preempt and command them, trusting that scale, debt, and administrative will can substitute for organic demand.
Laozi says, “Less, one gains; more, one is confused.” When building exceeds genuine need, what first appears as abundance and spectacle soon becomes overcapacity, debt, waste, and maintenance burden. What is celebrated as achievement eventually becomes liability.
Less does not mean backwardness. It means discipline, proportion, and alignment with reality. More does not necessarily mean development. It often reveals confused priorities, misallocated resources, and an obsession with visible scale that loses sight of actual human need.
Laozi reminds us:
“He who forcibly acts ruins things; he who tries to grasp them loses them.”
Instead of allowing roads, rail, and cities to emerge from the organic flows of commerce, population, and demand, Chinese authorities try to seize the process and command outcomes from above. But what is produced under compulsion often lacks the living forces that sustain development. The result is not harmony, but infrastructure in search of users and projects in search of justification.
Wuwei means not violating the natural rhythm of society. It means building only where people and markets are already gathering, and where real demand is already maturing. Thus, building less–and only what is truly needed–is the gain. To build more simply because power can command it will confuse.
Overbuilding politically driven megaprojects is therefore more than an economic problem. It is a civilizational and philosophical error. It reflects the mistake of equating multiplication with achievement and scale with success. In such cases, “more” produces not strength, but confusion.
In Laozi’s terms, overbuilding reveals this pathology: what should have been guided by proportion, restraint, and natural demand has instead been driven by compulsion and by the confusion of mistaking “more” for “better.”
Two millennia ago, Laozi warned: “Less is gain; more is confusion.” In the “China Speed” frenzy of infrastructure overbuilding, need gave way to visibility. Infrastructure was homogenized into replicable symbols–new cities, high-speed rail stations, airports, bridges, and industrial parks–regardless of fiscal capacity or actual demand.