One day this summer, Sean Maloney, an executive vice president at Intel, was bouncing 上上下下from one appointment to another in northeastern China, speeding along in a van 货车traversing newly built highways. He gazed out at one of the world's biggest construction projects: a network of high-speed train lines — covering 10,000 miles (16,000 km) nationwide — that China is building. As far as the eye could see, there sat vast concrete support struts支架, one after another, exactly 246 ft. (75 m) apart. Each was full of steel cables钢丝绳 and weighed about 800 tons. "We used to build stuff too," Maloney mused深思, unprompted自发的. "But now it's NIMBY [not in my backyard] every time you try to do something. Here,'' he joked, "it's more like IMBY. There's stuff happening here, everywhere and always."

It's not just NIMBYism that constrains限制约束 the U.S. these days, of course. America is close to tapped out敲出 financially, with budget deficits this year and next exceeding $1 trillion and forecast to remain above $500 billion through 2019. But sometimes the country seems tapped out in terms of vision and investment for the future.

Some economists believe that given its stage of development, China spends too much on expensive items like high-speed rail lines. But step back from the individual infrastructure projects and the debates about whether a given investment is necessary, and what's palpable可触知的 in China is the sense of forward motion, of energy. No foreigner — at least not one I've met in five years of living here — even bothers denying it. And the Chinese take it for granted.

When a brand-new six-lane highway opened in suburban Shanghai in October, Zhong Li Ping, who shuttles穿梭 migrant workers民工 to the city and back to their hometowns, said, "I don't know what took them so long." In truth, it took about two years — roughly the time it would take to get the environmental and other regulatory permits for a new highway in the U.S. If, that is, you could get them at all.

There's no direct translation into Chinese of the phrase can-do spirit. But yong wang zhi qian 勇往直前probably suffices. Literally, it means "march forward courageously."

China has — and has had for years now — a can-do spirit that's unmistakable不会误解的. Americans know the phrase well. They invented it. It used to define them.

Critics of the authoritarian Chinese government would say it's a system more accurately called "can do — or else."

And they have a point. No one in the U.S. would argue that it should adopt China's dictatorial style of government. America doesn't need to displace tens of thousands of people in order to build a massive dam, as China did in Hubei province from 1994 to 2006. (The value of checks and balances相互制衡 is, in fact, among the many things China could learn from the U.S.)

But you don't have to be a card-carrying持有会员证的正式 communist to wonder how effectively the U.S. develops and executes ambitious projects. Ask James McGregor. He's a former chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in China and now a business consultant who divides his time between the two countries.

"One key thing we can learn from China is setting goals, making plans and focusing on moving the country ahead as a nation," he says. "These guys have taken the old five-year plans and stood them on their head. Instead of deciding which factory gets which raw materials, which products are made, how they are priced and where they are sold, their planning now consists of 'How do we build a world-class silicon-chip industry in five years? How do we become a global player in car-manufacturing?'"

Some of this is the natural arc of a huge, fast-growing country in the process of modernization. The U.S. in the late 19th century was nothing if not what Intel's Maloney would call an IMBY country. America was ambitious. There's no secret formula to help the nation get back its zeal for what it used to enthusiastically and sincerely call progress. But even though the U.S. is a mature, developed country, many economists believe it has shortchanged少找零钱，投资不足 infrastructure investment for decades. It possibly did so again in this year's stimulus package. Just $144 billion of the $787 billion stimulus bill Congress passed earlier this year went to direct infrastructure spending. According to IHS Global Insight, an economic-consulting firm, U.S. spending on transportation infrastructure will actually decline overall in 2009 when state budgets are factored in — this at a time when the American Society of Civil Engineers contends that the U.S. should invest $1.6 trillion to upgrade its aging infrastructure over the next five years.

When the economic crisis hit China late last year, by contrast, almost half of the emergency spending Beijing approved — $585 billion spread over two years — was directed at projects that accelerated China's massive infrastructure build-out. "That money went into the real economy very quickly," says economist Albert Keidel of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

But it's not just emergency spending on bridges, roads and high-speed rail networks that's helping growth in China. Patrick Tam, general partner at Tsing Capital, a venture-capital firm in Beijing, says the government is aggressively helping seed 播种the development of new green-tech industries. An example: 13 of China's biggest cities will have all-electric bus fleets within five years.

"China is eventually going to dominate the industry for electric vehicles," Tam says, "in part because the central government has both the vision and the financial wherewithal必要的资金 to make that happen." Tam, a graduate of MIT and the University of California, Berkeley, says he does deals in Beijing rather than Silicon Valley these days "because I believe this is where these new industries will really take shape. China's got the energy, the drive and the market to do it."

Isn't that the sort of thing venture capitalists used to say about the U.S.?

to be continued