China has actually slowed down drastically over the past few years. They shot to middle class and are now facing middle class problems - unemployment, overpriced housing, low fertility rates, insane traffic, social welfare, etc.

The trade war since 2018 does impact their livelihood. But I think most impressions of China are just well outdated; they've been ahead of the curve for years now. Funny enough, a Google search on how China is doing will pop up what Americans think of China, despite me being geographically closer to China than USA.

If anything, there will probably be a lot of social reforms in the next 50 years or so because the political censorship is starting to crack. They'll need to loosen it to have control, ironically. We'll probably see it evolve to something similar to Western style surveillance and censorship, e.g. FBI kind of stuff.