Counting healthcare by number of intensive care departments is extremely odd in the first place.
A higher level department unit will often have just as much monitoring and ability to handle patients as intensive care, with the only major difference being that intensive care are the sole caretakers of intubated patients.
Intubation is a last line treatment with low long term survival rate. There are different philosophies here, intubation can boost survival chances but is also associated with long hospital stays which decreases survival chances.
Instead of intubating, one can choose to treat unstable patients with Non invasive ventilator, oxygen and/or intensified observation.
It is likely that China has a low ICU department count for the same reason Sweden and NZ have low ICU counts. They follow a healthcare philosophy of only intubating patients that have absolute indications for it.
Lack of ICU spots in China has almost never been a complaint nor a factor that affects life expectancy. That implies the seriously ill are being adequately treated, not in intensive care but by higher treatment level departments.
Turkey has 10x as many ICU beds as China per capita, yet their overall life expectancy is lower. Sweden has a mere fraction of a single bed per capita higher than China, but has a much higher life expectancy.
From this we can see that different intensive care philosophies tell us very little about the overall state of a nation's healthcare.
