You consume "services". The US has managed a massive increase in it's economic size using "services".
Besides, ask an average American what he spends his $$ on. It's mostly on rent, utilities, insurance, childcare, and other such "services". Most of the American economy is "services", which by itself is not good or bad. However, consumption of goods and consumption of services require different metrics, especially as you can buy an appliance for a couple of years but you can only buy childcare per hour.
Japan's high ownership is because of a strong domestic automobile industry from the 1950's to nowadays. In contrast, China before PRC has a grand total of 0 motor vehicles produced indigenously. As a result, Japan has plenty of time to accumulate cars over the years, naturally resulting in a high car per person ratio. In contrast, China's car industry is only now entering it's boom times. It will be interesting to compare electric car ownership between China and Japan over the next few years, as Japan automobile manufactures fall behind on this critical technology.
In other words, don't focus on what the numbers are right now, try and guess what the #'s are 5, 10, 20 years.
those are basically de-facto taxes then. if you consider everything that Chinese people get for free or via government, that would otherwise be privatized in the US, the end effect is an accounting trick to make taxes look like profit instead.
private healthcare that results in worse health outcomes than public and forces patients to keep going back? profit.
shit transit that forces you to buy a car? profit.
rent instead of building equity in property? profit.
insurance for things that would otherwise be covered by government laws and regulations? profit.
going by this, the US has some of the highest de facto taxes in the world.
For example, cars. Due to different conditions, we will not compare China with US but we can compare it to Japan. Both have excellent public transportation and high population density, both Japan and Eastern China has about 300-400 people per km2. Japan rank 19 in car ownership with 700 vehicles per 1000 people while China rank 94 with 226. You can say that Chinese people don't need cars thanks to excellent public transport but so is Japan. If you can boost China car ownership to Japan level then an insane market is created.
China doesn't even have enough parking spaces for the existing cars it has. There's 0.8 parking spaces per car in major cities, dropping to 0.5 parking spaces per car in small cities.
Due to how precious land is in China, if choosing between high value real estate and low value parking lots, the real estate wins every time. If parking lot is made to be high value by charging high parking fees, then people will just drive less because they can't afford to park anywhere. End result: still won't be able to expand driving easily.
Also note that in both China and Japan, its households that own cars, not individuals. Japan, due to the smaller average household size (2.25 vs. 2.95 in China), would naturally have a higher car ownership rate per capita.
Then there's the fact that Japanese still have 2nd hand cars accumulated from their 70 years of automotive experience while most cars in China are <20 years old.
