If you remove East Asia from the general non-Western category, I can't think of any other group of nations that can compete at the highest end of the value-chain. As years go by, it becomes harder and harder to blame things like "the legacy of colonialism".
By the same token, I wonder how much of the recent "convergence" of the RoW is just a story of China. I suspect most of it is.
Looking too much at gdp isn't that smart.
From the start, China has not targeted having x gdp. They're going for living quality and productivity indicators, because gdp is a result that may correlate with increased prosperity, while the former factors are the direct causes for prosperity.
China's history of cooking gdp numbers goes deeper than just deliberately using old models that don't include internet. They also manipulate statistics to push down the gdp adjustment factor. As an example, China's officially provided gdp adjustment coefficient is just 3.64, while Russia's is 26.6. At face values, this implies that russian living standards is 8 times cheaper than China's, which just isn't true. The factor can be manipulated by cherry picking what products are considered representative in your country.
China does this so they can export Yuan through CIPS to other countries at prices even relatively poor countries can afford, so the circulation can take root. In return, it causes prices from imports to be jacked up in China, but the thing is it doesn't matter because the domestic industry already covers all needs, and people are highly paid enough they can tank the import upcharge difference without noticing much.
Being from China, I would not call my own government out for economic deception in public media, knowing they do what they do to improve China's long term geopolitical prosperity and foothold.
But this sort of disparity between reality and lie is revealed if you check stats you can't hide such as electricity output/consumption and big ticket physical products like cars, appliances etc.
So I think ultimately tracking how many trillion $ lead China has in gdp is kinda entirely pointless. More interesting if the amount of industries/markets they can dominate, since it directly correlates to the actual prosperity of China.
