China's GDP per capita is still somewhere between #70 and #80 in the world[1]. It just happens to be a big country with lots of people.

If the US or most other western countries had same number of people is China, they would be doing much better. Also to go out on a limb a bit, you could probably draw a graph which shows a correlation between China relaxing its protectionism and its GDP increasing at a faster rate as a result.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...