Between 2011 and 2013, China poured more concrete than the United States did throughout the entire 20th century.

China’s infrastructure push began in the mid-’90s, but it really took off in the early 2000s — first in 2001, when the country adopted its tenth five-year plan, and again in 2008, when it cranked up the stimulus pumps amid the Great Recession. The central government has helped finance major projects, such as the build-out of highways and the world-leading high-speed rail network. Yet especially after 2008, local governments did much of the work, setting up state-owned investment companies and hopping on what economist Kai Yuen Tsui calls the “urban infrastructure express.” The express has four stops: localities expropriate far-flung rural land, use it to offset the improvement of agricultural land near population centers, put that land up as collateral for loans, and then sell the newly urbanized land to cover their debts. One side effect of this process has been the displacement of some 65 million rural people, many of whom have been resettled in shiny high-rises.

This model has produced spectacular successes. Today China boasts over 70% of the world’s high-speed rail, and its trains carry people on approximately 3.7 billion trips per year across a landscape that includes at least 38 new cities, 115 new airports, and 100,000 kilometers of new highways. Fueling all this is an electrical grid whose capacity has grown almost eightfold since 2000, with an increasing share of the energy coming from green sources like the Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest power station. Chinese president Xi Jinping justified this infrastructure frenzy by quipping that “if you want to get rich, first build the roads.” For a while, the data bore out his prediction: economists estimate that as China’s infrastructure investments rose to a whopping 24% of GDP between 2003 and 2016, they drove about 14% of its economic growth. During the Great Recession, China funneled almost half of its stimulus into infrastructure and posted growth rates above 9% while Western economies were contracting.