There are several residential blocks in central Shanghai, just a couple miles from the bond, that are still not fully served by indoor plumbing i.e. most dwellings have mains water but no sewage lines. Waste buckets are dumped by hand in communal septic tanks which is then emptied by regular vacumm truck visits.The neighborhoods are otherwise quite clean so people from the outside will rarely notice. It's more of an interesting anectode but people should know.

Anyway, there is a looming demographic catastrophy that nobody has mentioned: The working age population in China is due to crash in a decade or two thanks to irrational family planning policies of the past and it may already be too late to prevent it. Japan's decline coincided with their own demographic crisis and some even claim that the USSR collapsed because the Soviet society have never fully recovered from the massive population loss iN WWII. I don't see how China could get themselves out of the same fate.