From the LAT article today:
In the public sector, decisions are often made by Communist Party officials who see impressive buildings as key to a promotion. Then they assign a few bureaucrats with limited knowledge of contracting, cost control, project management, aesthetics or problem solving to carry out those decisions.
Some of this happens with government projects anywhere, but critics say the problems in China are compounded by the lack of democracy or taxpayer scrutiny under its top-down governing system. ...
Not to mention the absence of property rights, meaning the government (or well-connected officials like the fellow described in the NYT piece) can comandeer land with considerable impunity.
... China's building spree has also spurred an ongoing debate over preservation. Although the country arguably invented city planning thousands of years ago, as evidenced by the well-ordered grids of its ancient capital cities, its headlong impatience to become world class overnight often results in messy patchworks, as traditional courtyard homes are razed, the faster the better, to make way for skyscrapers as flashy as possible.
"It's not the first time the whole nation has suffered from a bout of overconfidence," says Zhou Rong, assistant dean of the architecture school at Beijing's Qinghua University. "In the 1950s, you had the Great Leap Forward, as China argued it could catch up with Britain in five years, the U.S. in 10. Now they're trying to do that all over again."
It seems to me there is sort of a precedent for this kind of development.