> Imagine how embarrassing and annoying it must be for Chinese people to see the relatively sub-par quality of the end result.

While this may be true for many shady developer-led real estate projects, it's absolutely not the case for the country's major infrastructure projects like airports, subways, high speed rail, highways, bridges, dams, etc. They rival or surpass anything you will see in the west in scope and quality, and built in a fraction of the time.