Is '去+verb' similar to 'to infinitives' in English? I am a collector. I collect sentences which I find interesting or exemplary for certain syntactical structures. I just stumbled over another example of this structure, so I thought I would ask the question here. These are some of my 'to infinitive' collection. There seems to be a remarkable similarity between this use of 去 + verb and the English to + infinitive.

Is this more apparent than real? Maybe this is only Modern Chinese, under  foreign influence. Can this kind of structure be found in Old Chinese? 

Does Chinese have a 'to infinitive'? 

(these are not all complete sentences, just the bits I saved) 

如何去尽责

理解为去爱别人

有专门去学这方面的知识

可能是错过了真正去生活的机会。

用自己的行动做表率，去影响自己的子女和整个社会。

Just thought I'd throw this in, 4 去s in one short text:

人们把老师比作“春雨”，把学生比作“春苗“，春苗需要春雨去浇灌。老师就如那绵绵的春雨，用丰富的知识去开启学生的智慧，用优秀的人格去培育学生的品德，用无私的奉献精神去熏陶学生的心灵。
Note: this answer may well be slightly incomplete.
Usage of to that can be translated to 去 is the case only in specific settings. For instance, in English, I like to read books is grammatically correct. However, the Chinese equivalent would be 我喜欢看书: there is no addition of something like 去 before the verb (i.e. 看). Thus, at the very least, there is no one-size-fits-all equivalent to the English infinitive and to the structure you mentioned. Now, it's also true that infinitives aren't necessarily used in identical ways across languages (e.g. English sometimes uses the gerund where French might use the infinitive), so I'll move onto a discussion of the structure you suggested itself.
Let's look at an instance of the structure.

我们约了在商场去看电影。
(We planned to meet at the shopping mall to see a film.)

Here, both 去 and the English to essentially serve as a marker to indicate cause. Because we're going to see a film, we planned to meet at the shopping mall. (Similarly, we could express the same idea in Chinese as: 为了看电影，我们约了在市场.) This is also the case in English, where to is being used as a preposition. This is also the case in your example of 用自己的行动做表率，去影响自己的子女和整个社会.
Let's look at some other examples, however, to check if that assessment is sufficient. I apologize for the poor quality of the glosses I provide -- but it's also just hard to come up with something better without more context.

理解为去爱别人 reads as something like understanding in order to love other people. So 去爱 seems to mean to love in same sense of the English infinitive (with to, in that case). (Similar example, modified from the dictionary: 我命令他们去调查这件事 -- I ordered them to investigate the matter.) So in some cases, 去 does serve as the to part of the infinitive in the most traditional sense.

Meanwhile, 有专门去学这方面的知识 reads as &quot;experts who go study ...&quot;, and there, 去 is used in a way similar to how it appears in something like 我现在去做功课, or in LINE Dict's example of 他去找报纸了. Here 去 essentially serves the same purpose as go in the English go do something.


So the 去 + VERB combination should not be interpreted as a parallel to the to + infinitive structure in English, since it doesn't always work that way.
Perhaps it's best to drop the idea of a Chinese infinitive (at least for modern Chinese), because of the lack of Chinese verb inflections -- the idea of an infinitive often involves the idea of it being an uninflected form, and Chinese isn't a synthetic language by most formulations -- and the failure of English constructions to necessarily correspond consistently to Chinese ones.