Is China the new Spain?

Worrying programme on tv Filmon last night:
This World: How China Fooled the World - With Robert Peston
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The topic was that after the west's financial crash in 2008, chinese export markets stopped buying. So the chinese went on a huge credit-based building programme: new airports, thousands of miles of motorway, metro systems in dozens of cities ...
There was one example of a city of 100,000 people paying for $24 Billion of public works. This sounded to me an awful lot like the vanity projects, runaway house/apartment building and local corruption that Spain has experienced. The programme also made it sound like this was just as out of control as it was here - and that the result will be the same, when it all inevitably comes to a grinding halt.
The only problem being that China is so much bigger and more influential than Spain, so then their bubble does burst it will affect the entire world - again.