Land leases are a red herring when it comes to superblocks too. There’s no reason why local governments couldn’t make money with smaller, more walkable blocks like you see in Manhattan or in central Paris. You need internal roads within parcels of superblocks to roughly the same extent you need them between smaller blocks. The government could have leased out the same area to the same developers and have had them build smaller blocks.

My personal bugbear when it comes to Chinese urban planning is the dearth of green space. Pudong was the countryside 30 years ago and now it’s built up. If you compare it to Singapore the latter comes off incomparably better. The four or eight lane highways in between blocks in Pudong are just awful, car centric, an avoidable mistake.

This is the cart before the horse. Beijing didn't start out as a large city. It is municipal annexation that makes Beijing a large city, which is fairly common in China, e.g. Beijing and Xiong'an, Guangzhou and Panyu, Nansha.

- Governments are incentivized to promote development above all else, which means that unsavory tactics like unfair compensation of rural farmers is rampant.

- At the same time, governments are incentivized to prop up property prices. The housing price to income ratio is a multiple of those even in Western cities, making it unaffordable for most citizens. And the central government cannot deflate a plainly obvious property bubble threatening the economy, because then developers won't make land-lease payments and the local governments will default en masse.