And then gaslight others for pointing out the facts ...
I work for a company that sells an electrical device, which has considerable standards applied in Europe and North America, and basically none in China. The competitive products to ours in China are essentially dangerous. They will start fires.
We manufacture in China, and depending on the manufacturer, can usually make no assumptions about quality, other than it will be the lowest possible unless there is considerable oversight. Unbelievable, 'shocking' hacks and cutting corners, which we view as a matter of quality, they view as a matter of cost reduction. With the bigger factories that do business with big established brands, that's less of a problem because they're consistently building for markets with higher standards and requirements.
For some thoughts on Food Safety [1][2]
In China, in the year 2000, only 50% of the population had 'basic sanitation' services i.e. toilets. That's changed a lot, but there are still wide swaths of population literally without basic sanitation. The number is effectively 100% in almost every other semi-developed country. [3]. Even in 2015, 5% of the country still does not have access to basic water. [4]
Chinese construction standards are de-facto low (they have regulations, just not very well met), so here are two videos that demonstrate some issues [5][6] - to be fair - this is all anecdotal, and China is a 'very large place'. You're surely going to find crap construction in every country, however, the anecdotes are quite excessive, and they are illustrative. Entire sections of homes, only a few years old completely falling apart, buildings falling down etc..
This affects major projects [7] - there are systematic problems with the quality of concrete that will come home to roost some day.
As far as Air Quality, it's 'Very Bad' - the CEO of DiDi lamented this herself, indicating literally her children had difficulty breathing.
Have a look [8] at the air quality literally at this moment in time. Up to 30% of China is, at this literal moment in time, breathing air that is 'hazardous'.
And of course the political issues, censorship etc. - but those are harder to factor into an economic equation.
So when calculating PPP - the material quality of goods does matter, things like 'air quality' aren't in that calculation but they very well do matter as they are a direct externalization of the system.
China is a large, poor country and derives it's economic power mostly from it's size, not that much else. It's different than Brazil or India (other large, poor countries) in that it does have a number of economic champions.
There's almost a 100% chance that China will soon have the largest economy in the world (by many measure it already does), but almost a 0% chance that we will see GDP/capita, even on a PPP basis, reach that of most modern nations, at least in our lifetimes. That is happening/will happen only for a subset of the population.
[1] https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2014/07/chinas-food-safety-is...
[2] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/fsn3.1281
[3] https://news.cgtn.com/news/2019-11-18/How-the-Toilet-Revolut...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_supply_and_sanitation_in...
[5] https://digg.com/video/heres-a-disturbing-supercut-of-poorly...
[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XopSDJq6w8E&ab_channel=ADVCh...
[7] https://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1191896/shenzhen-con...