Mao did 101 nation rebuilding on steriods, basic handbook of land reforms, creating mass cultural identity, spam primary industries to get out of agrarian economy. Progress wasn't just limited to Mao's dumbness but the peoples. PRC was a blob of unskilled peasants, shit tier human capital, vs Mao had technocrats advisors. If anything he was smart enough to realize at PRC population scale, he can spam lives for progress. Get millions of peasants involved in industrialization and some/sizable talent will manifest in right of bellcurve. Talent that Deng took advantage of. PRC wasn't going to become factory of the world without Mao raising workforce skill and making sure everyone spoke mandarin - fungible bodies that can migrate to factory work. Mao/Deng external conditions also weren't up to PRC alone, post WW2 west wasn't going to get friendly due to how blocs developed.

>PRC collapse

Still top performing economy in it's class, enviable growth in real terms while moving up value chain. Meanwhile US labels PRC most serious systemtic competitor with capability to displace, while pouring inordinate resourses and adopting PRC style industrial/tech policies to compete. That suggest it's showing it's strength more than ever. Imitation most sincere form of flattery

>demographic collapse ... >India

PRC is in process of exploiting THE greatest high skilled demographic divident in human history. The kind of divident actually involved in building advanced power. Like of all areas CCP top down approach is showing it's strength, it's demographic planning. Reduced birth rate higher than expected but the TLDR is PRC demographers did rub their 2 brain cells together when projecting family planning in 50 years ago and right now PRC is in roughly on course in terms of predicted development phase -> fear get too old before getting rich with too much people, limit births, peasant parents have mobility to work in factories, concentrate wealth to educate/upskill 1-2 kids, educated generation move up value chain.

India is not at sustainable demographic growth. India is trending toward basically the NIGHTMARE scenario that made PRC implement family planning in the first place. PRC system with much more state capacity than India wanted less people because it knew uplifting 1B+ was going to be monumental / impossible task. PRC still dealing with 500M (skew old and resigned) people that got left behind with 5x GDP per capita, with high savings and home ownership rate. India is going to end up twice+ as much unproductive workforce (skew young and rebellious) with fraction of state resources/power to support. Demographics is more than pyramid and TFR. Like the only benefit of Indian population is they're vegetarian (because that's what prolonged poverty ingrains in culture) which is good for food security.