I'm not making the argument China was more advanced than the British Empire. I'm saying there is an ocean of difference between a country with it's own writing system and taxation, and a country that does not. Not everyone has a particle accelerator in there backyard but there is institutional knowledge baked into the society.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minggatu

This is a real person that existed, they were not banging rocks together they were doing sophisticated mathematics, I'm overstating anything. It's not my description of China these are historical facts. One the communist party would very like people to forget because it doesn't suit their narrative. They failed with their planned economy and they persecuted their scientists and scholars for being part of the wrong class. They actively caused a regression where millions died from their incompetence. Credit where credit is due they have since corrected course to some extent.

And no I can't find out what the communist party is thinking by talking to old people in rural China. One they don't know, two most Chinese people are extremely Cagey about what they think, you need to know them for years until they trust you enough to talk about it if you are Chinese and even longer if you are not.

If your wife is Chinese it might do you some good to read up on what a primary source is and then go read some Chinese History.

"You're not gonna tell me Chinese are smarter, are you?" No I'm not, but I will say culture does play a massive role, China was not a bunch of roaming tribes living off the land. Turn the clock back a couple of hundred years and it would be peak civilisation. China was literally thousands and thousands of years ahead of somewhere like North Sentinel island.

Calling China a developing country is actually pretty absurd, it's much more like a rebuilding country. GDP was the only undeveloped part because the communist party was terrible at running the economy. Art, science, poetry, fashion, literature, philosophy, culinary arts it was all present and pretty cutting edge up until the communist party ruined things.

It's the same reason Japan, German and the UK bounced back after WW2 except instead of it being war ( Japanese invasion and Chinese civil war aside ) it was self inflicted.

Also I don't think China has escaped the middle income trap. China to this day has horrible wealth inequality and pretty bad social mobility. I actually think this is an intentional strategy they have an underclass of cheap workers for a reason, the government doesn't force a high minimum wage for a reason. Then they have a rich upper class that gets to study in the west and buy a Porsche something that is completely unreachable for the rest of the country.

You are moving the goalposts, you asked to name a good government and I gave you one. On a spectrum from good to bad Australia is good.

If you ask to see a good horse and I show you one that can run at 30kmph, you can't in good faith complain that it requires oxygen and sometimes poops. It's not a bad horse because it can't fly.