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.