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BLOGGER Matt Yglesias and my colleague over at Free Exchange had an interesting exchange this week on the topic of Chinese growth. Both of them are riffing of this report in the Telegraph:

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City planners in south China have laid out an ambitious plan to merge together the nine cities that lie around the Pearl River Delta.

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The "Turn The Pearl River Delta Into One" scheme will create a 16,000 sq mile urban area that is 26 times larger geographically than Greater London, or twice the size of Wales.

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The new mega-city will cover a large part of China's manufacturing heartland, stretching from Guangzhou to Shenzhen and including Foshan, Dongguan, Zhongshan, Zhuhai, Jiangmen, Huizhou and Zhaoqing. Together, they account for nearly a tenth of the Chinese economy.

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Over the next six years, around 150 major infrastructure projects will mesh the transport, energy, water and telecommunications networks of the nine cities together, at a cost of some 2 trillion yuan (£190 billion). An express rail line will also connect the hub with nearby Hong Kong.

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Here's a map:

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This seems like some serious business. But my colleague notes that as large as it may seem, the Pearl River mega-city wouldn't be totally beyond the bounds of American comprehension: it's about the size of greater Los Angeles. "What the Chinese effort actually seems to entail," he writes, "is a significant improvement in transportation around the region, harmonised local policies, and a rationalised metropolitan system of governance."

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Mr Yglesias, for his part, notes that "we've largely stopped doing this in the United States." Perhaps. But let's not hit the panic button quite yet. American political leaders actually seem increasingly cognisant of the need for more infrastructure development and perhaps even some governmental reform. High-speed rail development may not be moving quickly, but it's moving—and that's more than could be said for tech-bubble-era-America.

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On Tuesday, for example, the White House announced a six-year, $53 billion plan to improve America's high-speed and inter-city rail. It's no mega city. But these sorts of stories out of China can only help America fix its problem of chronic infrastructure underinvestment. In a highly nationalistic democratic political culture that is always worried about decline—and often concerned about the rise of China—tales of "mega-cities" and massive domestic rail networks help create the political pressure for infrastructure investment. As Churchill said, "Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing—after they have exhausted all other possibilities." The business travellers of today can't travel between Los Angeles and San Francisco on a high-speed rail line. But one day, we almost certainly will.

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