What do you mean quietly beat it? Whenever they had a small outbreak, they would test the entire city. Symptomatic, asymtomatic, everyone in the span of a week. They spent a ton of money on shutdowns, testing, and contact tracing.
They just do batch tests and mix samples in groups, if positive, test again. My father did one a few months ago after returning from Qingdao, where there were a small outbreak then in a hospital.
China is really good at doing things at scale and honestly US is nowhere close (too slow and too inefficient, from what I see here in Santa Clara)
The main difficulty is getting everyone to give a sample but with China’s level of social cohesion and control that is a solved problem.
While in China, it's like putting sparks off here and there, but most of people are not affected. If the problem can be solved by money, it's not a real problem.