[bluGill]

While China's improvements are amazing, don't be fooled, overall China is still behind. They have more people and so totals can look good, but the common person has much improvement left before they beat the US. Ultimately, I think your argument comes down to, when you're on top, it is very hard to improve much more, while, when you're starting at the bottom, you can improve a lot very quickly and easily. Indeed, China's growth numbers have been slowing a bit recently, which supports my thesis. Only time will tell of course

Also there is plenty of reason to think that China isn't giving honest numbers, but what's the true numbers are is impossible to know

[somenameforme]

Behind by what metric? PPP their economy is already much larger, their educational outcomes are much better, they're doing wild stuff in bleeding edge domains like robotics, built/launched their own space station super rapidly, and so on. Pretty much the only domain they're clearly behind in is rocket technology owing to SpaceX, and back here stateside you have plenty of people that hope the company somehow fails because they don't agree with the political opinions of its founder.

And the numbers we're citing aren't just from China, but from third party organizations. In any case, the arguments don't come to debating numbers - the change is obvious and visible. It's not like they're claiming new record low unemployment while seemingly large numbers of people somehow people struggle to find jobs.