China's mistake is actually a shining example of the failures of a centrally planned economy. Any reasonably competent person would know that China had to build infrastructure in 1980 and would have probably made similar economic planning decisions that the Chinese did. But even they are stuck in an infrastructure construction bubble in 2020 to the point that it's easier to waste resources building unnecessary infrastructure than to try to reallocate labor and capital and natural resources.

(See also: Stalinist industrialization. It was easier for central planners to focus on the hypothetical exponential impacts of "building machine tools to build machine tools", or to focus on building as many T-34 tanks as possible, than to actually design a self-sufficient war economy, which they never really had--there was a very strong reliance on imports of Allied food, radios, and other small goods.)