It isn't like people sat in smoke filled rooms and pre-conspired their cities for pandemic controls, that part's silly but the way a lot of Chinese cities are constructed has its roots in this high modernist, Le Corbusier, Robert Moses style design[1].

Chinese urban planning is very much heir to this idea of regular, orderly urban development, in the parts of cities that aren't old and premodern. Everything has its place, the apartment complexes, the roads, the recreational areas, how people move, and so on. It's become very fashionable to rail against this in particular in Western intellectual circles but honestly having been to China but also to places like Chandigarh, I've had a pretty positive impression.

[1]https://99percentinvisible.org/article/ville-radieuse-le-cor...