One of the more ardent competitors in Beijing last week was Chicago’s mayor, Richard Daley. His city’s bidding for the 2016 Olympics, and he was in China to brush up.

He took a short ride on Beijing’s subway, largely built since 2002. News accounts say he was befuddled by a ticket kiosk. “We really have a lot to learn,” he said.

Got that right.

Actually, Chicago, which is up against Madrid, Rio de Janeiro, and Tokyo, already possesses some of Beijing’s building blocks of Olympic success. Let’s tally them.

Beijing is under one-party autocratic rule, great for keeping the proletarians on task, undistracted by democracy. The Commies monopolize public policy, from conscripting labor down to publishing the People’s Daily.

Chicago? A one-party regime has held power since 1989. That would be Mr. Daley’s people. Mr. Daley now has ruled almost as long as his dad, Richard J., and was handily re-elected in 2007.

Other parallels: China, while adopting elements of the free market, has nonetheless an overweening state, so much that it infamously arrests people for doing Falun Gong exercises. In Chicago, the government sticks its nose in people’s business, too. It banned foie gras. It banned smoking on sidewalks. It tried punitively taxing bottled water only to see residents buying it by the crate in the suburbs.

Here’s a 1970s flashback for Beijingers: That visiting Chicago mayor likes biking and wants Chicagoans to do it on a Mao-era scale. His city put in a big downtown bike parking ramp with showers for sweaty bike commuters.

In other ways, however, Chicago isn’t up to the Beijing standard. That subway, for instance: Chicago’s rapid transit lines don’t connect the planned venues, and you wouldn’t want a couple million guests seeing them anyhow.

So Mr. Daley checked out Beijing’s subway to experience transit stations that aren’t either foul-scented dungeons or exposed elevated platforms of wood and rusting metal. The extra-wide cars impressed him, and he speculated about fitting them onto Chicago’s elevated tracks. “We can put a man on the moon, we can really fix this,” he said.

Good luck. Chicago’s El lines were aged when Neil Armstrong flew; some were built before the Olympics began. It will take billions of dollars to fix them up, much less dig new, Olympian lines. Mr. Daley, however, is determined: He admits Chicago can’t spend the $40 billion that Chinese authorities have, but he’s counting on building some more transit with federal money. “This is the future,” he said. “You have to move people by public transportation.”

Try telling the Chinese. While millions ride the subway, the country remains the most rapidly motorizing on earth, as you’d expect of people who suddenly gain the freedom to move around and the money to do it.

That makes Beijing smoggy, which also sets it apart from Chicago. When a reporter interviewed overseas tourists to Chicago a few months back, most responded that they had expected it to be grittier, smokier, more Upton Sinclair.

But the meatpackers left for Iowa years ago. The really smoky factories stopped being smoky, or they moved to Alabama or China. Check the latter if you want gritty.

By all descriptions, a lot of China sounds similar to the Chicago of a century ago, a place on the make, as Nelson Algren put it. Factories sprout and people move by the millions to work in them, since the pay’s much better than raising pigs back in the village. Everybody’s chasing opportunity and finding it, more or less.

True, there are fewer immigrants and steeples than in old Chicago. That’s a loss, as religious freedom was part of what drew millions from their old countries in the first place. Religious freedom is one of man’s basic rights, and China denies it. So are the rights to rant in a newspaper, engage in schismatic politics, or chase utopian ideals, all abundantly used in Chicago of 1908 and absent from Beijing today.

Still, all that opportunity-chasing lets millions of Chinese live better than they once did, and it is improving Beijing, making it grander — not only more factories but more skyscrapers, as well. Mr. Daley is right: We could learn something.

Chicago now is growing slowly, even compared with other American cities. In part, that’s because it’s already built up. Also, it’s because, like other slow-growing northern cities, its economic dynamism, blue collar or white, is weighted by established interests. The city’s schools are weak; improvements are slowed by change-averse teachers unions. Great stretches of the city lack decent groceries, yet Wal-Mart still can’t get permission to put in a store: Better vacant lots than a non-union supercenter, is the thinking.

Not that Chicago should Olympically model itself on smoggy, authoritarian China — besides, where in America could you line up a couple thousand opening-ceremony drummers who’d work in such creepily Commie synchronicity?

But the reason China has trainloads of money to stage its Olympics is because, freed, its economy generated the wealth in the first place. Freed and growing fast, its economy could afford to be skimmed for such public-projects grandeur as $7.7 billion in new subways.

If there’s a lesson for Chicago, it’s that the Olympics will cost vast sums. To afford it, the place might want to regain some of that opportunity-city testosterone it once had, back when it first built its Els.

Mr. McIlheran is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.