Gansu, Heilongjiang, and Jilin are the poorest Chinese provinces? Did you somehow forget to consider provinces like Tibet, Xinjiang, Guizhou, and Guangxi which are much much poorer than the three you just described?
I forgot to mention Guangxi, but Gansu Heilongjiang Jilin are in the bottom 4. Please be current on your statistics and don't act in fabricated outrage when someone brings them up.
Tibet, Xinjiang, and Guizhou are down in the bottom 3; China has a significant inter-provincial wealth disparity. But this was in response to another poster who overstated China's wealth; the effects of the 3:1 ratio is that Jiangsu / Zhejiang / Fujian are 5-10 years away from matching South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan in terms of material prosperity, while the worst performing Chinese provinces are comparable to the best performing Indian States.
Nice try of gaslighting to put India under more favorable (innocent?) light but the part I quoted showed how much you really know...see, for a good part of modern Chinese history (up to pre-1950s at least) the lion share of Chinese industrial output concentrated in the north east, in the region also known as Manchuria, and saying that you've to be utterly ignorant of modern Chinese history to not know it was literally under Japan occupation even before 1937, the year that Japan made its full-scale invasion in our timeline. In other words, ROC, which without a meaningful industrial base of its own, even with those elite formations fully modernized as planned, would not last too long in attrition as IJA and IJN brought its industrially-backed might to bear...under such scenario, defeats and even Nanjing Massacre would still be inevitable, perhaps delayed, but still inevitable.
And today's China? Because it's "not free" so warmongering opinion (ultranationalism) is still very much suppressed, just look at how it played this whole situation down domestically when compare with India's side of fanning the fire should tell you everything. Today's China still all the talk about "recovery" and "get back to work", "enemies are encroaching" is a fact despite Beijing's obvious reluctance to admit but enough of an open knowledge to the masses.
I try to avoid taking sides in nationalistic disputes; doing so is awfully vulgar and results in bad consequences. As for RoC vs Manchukuo, the RoC apparently was upgrading its military systems and had a massive superiority in manpower. Hell, even during the war, the RoC had better artillery than the Japanese, except that military corruption / factionalism prevented the RoC from actually using them with effect. A famous story goes that Stillwell was asking why the RoCA wasn't using its artillery superiority against the Japanese, to which he responded "this or that division has the best artillery in the RoCA. If we were to use it and lose it, we would no longer have the best artillery in the RoCA."
Reading this is a waste 5 minutes of my life that I'll never get back. It's unbelievable naive.
The highlights being comparing provincial China poorest and richest nonsense. In geopolitics it's nothing to do with riches or poorest provinces. China's military strength comes from the aggregate of the nation's wealth.
And as for the growth rates of China and India comparison, you do realised China is 4 times bigger that India's. Right? Even using you figures that India Is going to grow 3% more than China's. At that rate, it would take them at least 40 years to catch up!
Nominally, China is about 4-5 times as strong as India economically. PPP-wise, it's about 3-4 times stronger.
But seriously, when it comes to military force, the logistics favor the Indians on a war on the border due to proximity. If say, the US and China were neighbors (and they are in a way, through the Pacific Ocean), the Chinese would never be able to defeat the United States because you'd have a larger nominal economy and a more advanced military.
However, the tyranny of distance means that Chinese materiel can be moved only a couple of hundred km by land, whereas the United States has to move its assets by sea, imposing costs and creating targets for a PLARF focused on area denial.
In the Sino-Indian case, Tibet is a relatively-poorly linked frontier region, thousands of km away from China's industrial heartland. The Ladakh / Hinachal Pradesh / Sikkim / Arunachel Pradesh borders, in contrast, are closely linked to the Indian heartland, especially the Northern regions that are next to Uttar Pradesh.
The point is, China also sees a similar scenario to the EoJ and Nazi Germany insofar as it needs to get infrastructure up ASAP, because it doesn't matter how strong your military is if you can't get your military on-site; the most dangerous bases to the InA / InAF aren't in Tibet proper, they're in Xinjiang, which has the proximity to seriously threaten the Indian airforce. Likewise, when it comes to basing, the InAF has more bases facing China than China has bases facing India. This is a weakness that has to be remedied while the Indians refuse to grow up and join BRI.
