There are plenty of examples of invidiuals who do object. However, unlike in other countries, developers and the government are free to bully them and ruin thei

There are plenty of examples of invidiuals who do object. However, unlike in other countries, developers and the government are free to bully them and ruin their lives for daring not to sell their homes. Plenty of examples of houses in the middle of highways (one famously literally in the middle of the road), packed between huge flats, in the middle of active construction sites, placed on top of huge hills or pits when land height is altered, and other places where you'd never want to live. That said, the Chinese state is also doing this by spending a lot of money on infrastructure. This isn't unlike what the west did when everybody got electricity, phone lines, clean water, sewers, heating, and things like bridges and infrastructure. Of course the government helped rollout of rail infrastructure in populated areas by creating the necessary laws and ordinances (less populated land was still cheap enough that companies could just buy land). That approach worked fine, until populations grew so there was less cheap land and property became a method of investment that drove up prices to a ridiculous degree. My country's rail network has been reduced to the essentials, after several mergers and services that became unprofitable were shut down (despite them working fine as independent companies). Building new rail now takes decades of negotiations instead of a few years of laying tracks, if funding can even be secured, as politicians seem to hate the idea of investing in public transport when we could add Just One More Land. The entire system has been clogged. The authoritarian system is one way to work around the problems of modern high-density society, but it's not necessarily the only way. The trouble lies in convincing enough people to accept the downsides, and to stop the greedy fraudsters from bleeding any development plan dry in any way they can.