I was in China a few weeks back, and wrote a previous article about the order and systems present there, particularly from a financial aspect. The analogy I keep coming back to is that Chongqing is roughly 4x the population of New York City, and it doesn't suffer the same growing pains. It also isn't the city in China the way Seoul is for South Korea.
Since then, I did some research and discovered that one of the primary mechanisms behind this growth is called hukou.
Essentially, every citizen is registered to a hometown, and things like schools and healthcare are tied to where you're registered (rather than where you live). Getting registered in Beijing or Shanghai is hard (those operate on a quota) whereas in a smaller city, it's easy. It steers where settling down is cheap.
I'm going to use two analogies that come to mind here.
In a biological circulatory system, you want blood flowing throughout the entire body, not concentrated or clotting in one area. When you create a system that encourages this distribution (aka a strong circulation), distant areas are more likely to receive the oxygenation and resources they need to thrive.
In another analogy, I think of pipe pressure - how water flows in a large system of valves and pipes so as not to burst any single pipe from overpressure or underdeliver to any particular spout. Countries where everyone pours into one capital city while the rest of the country hollows out are dealing with exactly this kind of pressure problem. In China's case, hukou is one of the main things regulating it.
The other half is that China built the destinations too - high-speed rail to basically everywhere, and cities like Chongqing and Chengdu developed on purpose so the coast isn't the only option. For what Amtrak charges from Milwaukee to Chicago, you can ride first class on a bullet train much further - which is kind of nuts.
This is leveling up internal distribution on a completely different scale, and it also means that regions are able to share resources much better. No single city gets to be the one everyone moves to, and thus, the idea of a single, isolated "Silicon Valley" city in China doesn't really hold.
Naturally, I'm a Western foreigner to China, and my interpretation is limited to my research combined with my lived experience while there. I absolutely think it's a cultural thing as well; there is a strong national identity of being Chinese ("zhonghua"), and collectivist societies are better at rallying the entire populace behind a given standard. It's eye-opening having lived in America my whole life, and I think that collectivism is a big part of why China is misunderstood in many ways.
Now, on scale - because I don't think this type of growth is exclusive to China. Look at the analogies I used before; natural systems are capable of efficient distribution among different nodes.
For any sort of replication of this process, I think a little graph theory is necessary - take a problem and model it as a group of nodes and the connections between them. Then, flatten the eigenvector centrality of all those nodes (i.e. how important each node is relative to the others). Another useful measure is betweenness centrality (i.e. how often one node is used as a bridge between other nodes) - flatten that too. No single node should monopolize the others, and creating more connections between nodes is one of the best ways to keep it that way.
What I'm getting at here, and it sounds unintuitive: all of this distribution is only possible because a few things are deliberately not distributed. In my previous article, everyone in Chongqing was paying through Alipay - a single node that everything routes through. The registration system, the rail planning, the payment app - those are centrally controlled precisely so that everything downstream of them can be spread out.
Social media companies do a smaller version of this when they decide how the people inside their platform talk to each other and what they see. I think this is what lets you model almost any problem (a market, a team, a product's users) as a China-style scalable system: figure out what absolutely positively needs to stay in one place, and spread everything else out.
Agree or disagree, let me know what you think - especially if you've lived there.
Be well,
Michael Kirsanov