[ralusek]

It is authoritarian, but so is every government intervention. Authoritarian actions aren't inherently bad...it's just dangerous and often suboptimal to resolve issues by force.

This is effectively "infrastructure spending," which is the thing China has done best, and very few people in the US and Europe actually oppose. The complaints against infrastructure spending don't tend to be that they represent government overreach, but rather that they tend to overspend and do a terrible job (see California bullet train).