I'd cut the country stereotypes out of the picture, but there's definitely more than one kind of corruption, and the kind of damage it does changes.

You are absolutely correct that large construction projects are very vulnerable to corruption: Anything that has as high a budget is going to be rife with opportunities. But a project's culture will alter the kind of corruption you get. I was quite close to the construction of bridge spanning over a river, a little under a mile wide. Significant slippage in the delivery date was going to be very annoying to the powers that be: Being able to finish the construction prior to the next election was important, and being seen as the cause for a delay was going to lead to losing more projects that some of the very same people were going to keep overseeing in the future. So the bridge was done on time. It's just that a lot of palms got greased, and extra 'cement money' really went into things it shouldn't. For instance, the bridge's main engineer had just bought a derelict house that was completely restored by 'elves', from the construction company.

Sometimes the fact that something took 4 years too long is tolerable to the powers that be, while the construction definitely remains safe. Other times, the construction is just going to prove really faulty in 15 years, because things didn't go over budget, and someone took the difference between what the spec called for, and what could possibly appear to be a completed project.

Same with permitting. In some cities, corruption means you don't let people build something because you don't want it. In others, the mayor tells their friends to buy land zoned for low density, and then rezones to let them build 20 story buildings, making a mint. Still corruption, but different parts of a project suffer the consequences.

Only truly cursed projects manage to take 4 times as long, 20 times the costs, and end up with something awful in the end.

Are you aware of how much building China has had to do? There is no citation needed, you just look at the what they have done already. They have built so much that mining companies have had invest hundreds of billions into single-resource mines to meet demand, they have already had one of the most successful infrastructure build-outs in human history.

Shenzen was a rice paddy in 1990 and two decades later was a city of 20m people (2nd highest number of skyscrapers in the world too). The exact reason why China have been able to do this is the reason why you think it is impossible. People in the west are too lazy, too self-indulgent, too anxious about what other people are doing...China did it, they aren't paying attention, they don't care, they didn't ask anyone for permission, they just did it. In the time it takes to build a road in the US, they built a city with one of the most productive economies on the planet...where do you think the future is?