But the scale China works at is mind boggling and I couldn't hope to say I could "build a city" better.
Because you would probably never make the same trade-offs they do. In the USA we are a little cavalier about eminent domain. In China, the practices go beyond brutal and straight to the inhumane. They will happily displace entire villages to get the job done, and they don’t worry too much about the details of where people end up or how they get compensated.
They also make choices that would be baffling here in the west. For example, they frequently do absolutely nothing to maintain new developments, and often those developments are of unbelievably low quality. With in a year or two, many of them look like they have been crumbling for decades.
Source: Asian family, real estate investments in China.
Building the pyramids and the great wall and many other "wonders" took literally slave labor for multiple lifetimes and yet somehow people still admire these "achievements". (They have lasted however!)
They need a city, or ten. Not an outhouse. There is no way to build a city and make everyone happy. Do I think they do it best? No, obviously not.
But the Western world would be bogged down in NIMBYism while the chinese engineered cities are built and done.
As for quality... I saw a few things on my holiday trip to China many years ago so I don't doubt poor quality is a thing.
But here in Australia any high rise apartment building built in the past ten years in Sydney or Melbourne is now suspect due to dodgy building practices too. Maybe the building is fine. Maybe it isn't. But they are all tainted with suspicion.
So while I think the Western world still has the edge on China in quality, it is a slippery slope when "homes" are in a market to "make money" rather than "house people".
They are ghost towns on arrival for two reasons.
1. The employer base (say, government ministries) have not yet moved out of their current locations into the newly built cities. They are planned to in the future - and many former ghost cities are now bustling.
2. China has hundreds of millions of people who are trying to stop being subsistence farmers, and urbanize. It's an absolutely unprecedented demographic shift, anywhere in the world. This is a proactive solution for dealing with what would otherwise be the world's biggest housing crunch.