No Iraqi is comparing US to Iraq. I don't understand why there is always a contest between US and China. US is a developed country, and China is a developing country. It is not a beauty contest. Also there does have to be only one winner. Maybe, just maybe, there is no need to mess up another country.

China is the second richest country in the world. It has the most billionaires, and has experienced steady economic growth for decades. It baffles me that people still classify them as a developing nation.

Now do per capita and income inequality.

Shanghai is modern. Huge parts of the country are developing.

As an econ major, it seems to me that you're only getting downvoted because HN is a typical place full of engineers with little econ understanding but lots of opinion.

Whether a country is developed or not is defined based on their standard of living per capita, not their absolute size. A country with a billion poor people has completely different social, demographic, industrial and political drivers than a country of 300m high I come people.

Genuine question: what is it that qualifies China as a developing nation?

The last thing on my mind when I think of China is "its a developing nation." China seems to own quite an empire.

There is no proper framework to define a 'developed' or 'developing' country. At the WTO, individual countries are allowed to self-allocate themselves. Those in the 'developing' group then get preferential trade benefits. These trade benefits are the only reasons China holds tightly to the 'developing' country label.

Even if China has the same GDP as US, the per capital GDP will be 1/6. That's the reality. There are cities in China is comparable to western cities, especially infrastructure, because the country has invested a lot in infrastructures. Americans have to know their position. They are not developed world, they are superpower. Below US there are developed world, then developing world, then there are not-developing world (we keep forgetting them).

Personally I believe once a nation reach developed status, the main task for the government will not be generating new source of income and improve people's life financially, it will be about how to distribute wealth fairly.

These labels aren't useful for extremely large / diverse countries.

Coastal China has per capita GDP comparable to Taiwan. Interior provinces is much poorer, with 600M living on 1000RMB/month or 2000USD/year, on the level of Haiti. In aggregate China is a middle income country with per capita GDP of Iraq.

The Chinese system harnesses this income disparity + 1.4 Billion people to concentrate talent, wealth and development systematically rival developed nations. That's just a factor of scale. Quantity has a quality of its own if properly coordinated, which is basically broad TLDR of Chinese history up to industrialization. I suppose people didn't think China could catch up this fast.

China is a US population-worth of developed nation and twice that of developing nation, roughly speaking.

You have a point, but China and the US are rival countries with ideologies that aren’t completely compatible