it also doesnt help that china hasn't released bad years of economic performance, so we don't actually know how they're doing, unless they've recently started reporting those again. But regardless, that still influences the worse times so.

My two bit variable analysis on china tells me they're likely to have a substantially more volatile economy, in part due to heavier regulations and restrictions, as well as the fact that free market entities are entirely self regulated and tend to balance to equilibrium very aggressively (removing outside influence of course) where as more centrally controlled economies, tend to be more problematic in this regard. China probably has a pretty good balance between the two going on, but it's questionable what that balance even is. Generally a pretty good indicator for the general productivity of a country is their military and it's equipment, the more advanced it is, the more money they're likely to put into it, the more quantity they have, the more manufacturing they dedicate towards it. The USSR primarily known for sheer quantity output, china has also been known for quantity, but it seems they're pushing for more advanced technology recently. The US, naturally, going for extreme technological advantage, and the potential for massive manufacturing bases, as evidenced by ww2. The sheer productive ability of the US matched with it's geography and natural resources is a massive benefit to something of that caliber. Especially when we include something like NATO.