As a union nurse (1199) I can assure you all that the travelers making lots of money is NOT the problem, and is only happening rn because for the first time in decades, it is an area where workers are so desperately needed, yet so scarce, that they can basically name their rate and have it honored. This is scaring the shit out of the people at the top, and they want to nip it in the bud before other peasants start to catch on
Edit: Here's a direct link for ppl who don't want to go to R*DIT
https://welch.house.gov/sites/welch.house.gov/files/WH%20Nurse%20Staffing.pdf
If you have a SLAY KWEEN (D) rep or a Marjorie Taylor Green adjacent chud rep(R), they are both likely on this
The competency of the Chinese state is always and forever up for debate. Certainly, Xi wouldn't need to run around doing SWAT raids and mass arrests if everyone downstream operated as this friction-less corruption-free communist utopian machine. But the Chinese state has a massive population and a firm position within the global supply chain, up to and including directly into the beating heart of the Western Empire. It has room to fail, to engage in inefficiency, to analyze and self-correct, and to improve over time. That's a benefit the USSR never had.
The USSR entered the 1950s struggling to yank its post-war accumulated satellite territory out of horrific poverty and potential population collapse. It had to immediately position itself for a global Cold War that would last the next fifty years. And it would need to fight a propaganda war against a rival that had been fighting communist ideology domestically for longer than it had existed.
China entered the 20th century with a fabulously wealthy industrial coastline and an utterly insulated interior. It had a glut of domestic workers, a wealth of domestic and neighbor-state resources to draw on, a global supply chain to exploit, and the tacit approval of western powers to pursue unlimited speedy economic growth in anticipation of a Capitalist-Reform pivot some time in the next decade. The west wasn't in a Cold War with China. It was engaged in a kind-of East Coast Marshal Plan - just plowing every last ounce of capitalist energy into assisting Beijing with rapid industrialization and incorporation into the western economic engine.
You can write this off as Deng's 11D chess. Or ascribe it to a Nixon/Reagan-Era colossal foreign policy fuck up. Or just note how 9/11 Changed Everything, accidentally deflecting America's imperialist impulses from China to the Middle East for nearly 20 years. But it has far less to do with Chinese inherent competence than a simple historical exemption to the Cold War that China benefited from and Russia did not.