The thing is investing in China a foreigner is a complete dice roll where you have no real power and no visibility into what you are investing in.
They are, but the foundation is rickety. Xi is a dictator. That increases the odds of catastrophic failure. Were an economic collapse to become protracted, it's not hard to imagine separatist movements and competing power sectors turning to violence as a political tool.
To me, they seem to be building on top of a more modern infrastructure base and do not have the super-prevalent NIMBY problems that exist in the West.
Economically, sure. (Those always struck me as sour grapes or a fundamental misunderstanding of how debt works in a centrally-planned economy.)
Politically, however, the CCP had intraparty competition that avoided the sort of rot that felled the Soviets. It also kept the Party thinking long term. Hong Kong and Taiwan are good examples of Xi's impatience. Absent intervention, Hong Kong would have uncontroversially folded into China in 2047. The combination of China's military and economic prowess, then, could have encouraged peaceful unification with Taiwan. But Xi was impatient. He wanted it in his lifetime. So he rushed Hong Kong and screwed up not only Taiwan, but relations with all his neighbors, from the Philippines to India.
Dictators like to style themselves as monarchs. But monarchy has a continuity that dictatorships don't. That makes them more impatient and more unstable, particularly at the transfer of power.
How new the roads and houses are doesn't seem like the most relevant factor for future economic growth.
The US built modern infra for the time, then it stagnated.
Japan built modern infra for the time, then it stagnated.
The US and Japan otherwise took very divergent economic growth paths.
China could go either way, but the increasing central control is hardly without risk for future economic development. Miss a few big bets and you have less of a backup plan than a less-organized economy.
China may have eliminated the term limit (of 2x5 years), but Xi has only been president for 8 years. They still have a fresh memory of transferring power. Certainly the longer he's president, the scenario you outline becomes more likely... but not in 8 years.
Countries that have never known democracy, or received democracy without ever truly fighting for it, don't really care much whether you're a dictator or not a dictator- that's all that they've known.
I'm not blaming anyone for the government model. Just staying that it comes with known risks, and one of those is economic depressions and power transitions becoming violent. The stakes are too high.
