I think it’s a lot more complicated than that. You must divide by the population if wealth/development/whatever metric were uniformly distributed. But it’s a massive country with enormous diversity in statistics on all fronts. There are pockets far more developed than the average American town and even the most developed cities in other countries, and villages hundred of years “behind.” Debating whether or not to call it “developed” means missing out on a whole lot of nuance.

You can’t even compare cities to cities, since even an entity like Beijing is structured and defined so differently from how we define a city like NYC or Chicago.

This is why I stressed the ethnocentrism of it all. It’s a country that has developed tremendously but not at all in the same way that we have traditionally defined development in the western sense, and a lot of that comes from its size, its historic dynastic cultures and their political structures, and its population (count and local densities).

Then cite the GDP/capita of individual provinces or cities. Citing the GDP of the entire country is meaningless, though, given that it has 1.4 billion people. China is not more developed than Monaco, even though its GDP is thousands of times larger.

I haven't ever heard of the Chinese government claiming China to be a developed country - that was one of the original contentions above. I also think that by any reasonable metric, China is a developing country. There are pockets that are much more developed than others, but the country as a whole is still very far behind developed countries.