That was the time after WW2. Of cause the economy does a lot better, when you do not bomb out cities and kill millions. That could have happened earlier, without the war and everybody would have been better of.

The US is at war and China is not. The third most powerful country would be India and afaik they are not at war right now.

WW2 was not a boon to production. Well it was for weapons, but most of Europe and good parts of Asia were destroyed with millions dead. The only country coming out of it in better shape was the US, which did not see bombing and had relatively low human losses(still horrible to be clear, but not even close to what others had).

Modern wars suck and any smart country will try to avoid them. Hence you see Russia being fucked over by the EU via Ukraine and China fucking the US via Iran. Obviously you need dumb leaders to walk into those traps into the first place.

The Chinese Super League had 6.1million tickets sold last season. It is a pretty decent size league.

Coal is mostly used to produce electricity and steel. So more electricity from solar then coal is actually good news.

However oil and gas are much harder to replace, but again we actually have a lot of the technology, it is “just” about rolling it out on scale, which is hard.

So US minimum wage for Venezuela?

China is following the playbook of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and similar countries. The all used window guidance to quickly grow targeted industries, which actually worked very well. All of them are wealthy countries today. However that dependence on how good the window guidance is. They take on a lot of debt to invest and it only works as long as the investment is actually smart. If not the debt increases and that causes massive problems down the line. So it creates a bubble and when it pops it hurts badly. After decades of growth those bubbles probably are nasty.