China also inherited it's own cold war military legacy. It's also not really comparable to any of those examples you talked about, because those countries don't have any affluent areas at all, while China is a continent sized country where some regions have similar development as west Europe, some have similar to east Europe and some have similar to Latin America.
A much more suitable comparison would be Europe. Europe has good areas like Germany and France, it also has shitty areas like the Baltics, Ukraine and Romania.
China is most accurately visualized as a continent with high income and middle income areas stacked together under one administration, sort of what EU would be like if EU actually ruled itself and the "European project" worked out as advertised.
Chinese development shouldn't be understood as one giant landmass of 12k GDP per capita. Rather, there are a few places with 25-30k GDP per capita, and a lot of places with 5-7k GDP per capita. In other words, plenty of Chinese are living in first world conditions, while many more Chinese are waiting to catch up. It also explains why China can develop state of the art technology in many fields with a relatively low GDP per capita: many of these developments are coming out of places like Shanghai and Shenzhen, which have GDP per capita of 25k and 33k respectively. You could say that China right now contains the equivalent of 2-3 Japans in terms of people living in high-income areas. Furthermore, given that many of the areas with 5-7k GDP per capita are playing catch up, you can only expect to see the amount of innovation and developments to only increase in the next 20 years.
I'm just saying that to any average person who simply looks at per capita gdp and HDI, that's the picture you get for China's development level regardless of its position as the world's second biggest economy. I don't know what point you're trying to prove here. China just due to its size has pockets of prosperity comparable to the global north, but on a whole is still a middle income developing country.
Having a consistently higher growth rate than Latin American, ASEAN, and Eastern European countries despite being at their GDP per capita level should give you a hint that the Chinese economy is structurally different compared to those economies. For example, Mexico has failed to match China's growth rate in 2021 despite having nominally similar GDP per capita.
Clues to other factors, like urbanization rate, electricity generation, can give a clue to the puzzle. China's urbanization rate is much much lower than Brazil or Mexico, meaning that more productivity can be generated by moving workers from farm to factory. Critical infrastructure like electricity and telecom is also generally more developed in China. The combination of a more developed infrastructure and cheaper consumer goods (China has domestically-manufactured substitute goods for most items) gives an impression that life in China is better than many countries of similar GDP per capita. Furthermore, for the above structural reasons, China in the next 10 years is predicted to leapfrog all these countries despite (initially) having similar GDP per capita. A future GDP per capita benchmark to look at would be Portugal, which Chinese leaders claim they can match at 2035.
