Per capita income? Percentage of people with education/clean running water/out of poverty? Things that actually matter to the daily lives of people?

Yes, China has lifted millions of people out of poverty over the last few decades, but the median person in China is still vastly worse off than the median person in Taiwan.

Chinese people know that Taiwan is only what it is because of money pumped by the US into the little island. It has always been the strategy of Western countries to support little states in the vicinity of enemy countries as a way to contain and divide the nation.

So when people in the US buy stuff and it's made in (mainland) China is that not considered money being "pumped by the US?"

U.S. Imports from Mainland China: $438.9 billion

U.S. Imports from Taiwan: $116.3 billion

Please explain how your logic survives this basic analysis.

I mean, we are also going to brush past the infrastructure development done by the Japanese when they occupied Taiwan during the Meiji period that made it a valuable island to begin with. Or that Taiwan did a better, more equitable and less violent version of land reform than Mao did. And that Taiwan never expelled academics and didn't attempt the Great Leap Forward.

If so, it would sound like the Chinese people are being mislead about the economic history of the island they supposedly claim.

North Korea has self sovereignty, space rockets, nuclear weapons, and sends its troops to a war overseas to project its power!

South Korea is just much more successful at putting bread (and many other foods) on the tables of its citizens. It is also more advanced technologically, and, curiously, has a working democratic government instead of a hereditary single-party rule.

Taiwan is 3x more prosperous per capita. PRC just has a lot more people.

So Norway and maybe Monaco are more successful than the US?

there are multiple success metrics

also, to answer the original question: yes they are

well that really depends on the metric right?

do you care about quality of life? literacy? about social justice? about women's rights?

or about who has the most richest billionaires or the strongest military?

or who has the best american football teams?

Not every people care about the same things. Some people would rather live in a country that treats others as shit, and take pride in that and absolutely don't see the point why other other countries have some better metrics on some they may consider useless stuff like education.

EDIT: I mean, I know it sounds silly, but failure to understand that there are so many people who literally don't give a shit about why education matters, or why empathy matters is the reason we are in this situation. We took for granted that there are universal values, and organized our societies around goals oriented towards those universal values and in the meantime we got this resentment brewing in part of the population that got exploited by populist forces

In improving the lives of their people?

Yes, absolutely.

Norway, probably yes. Their population is more educated, and their civil society much better functioning than the UK. Their society is less unequal and (I’m pretty sure) their quality of life figures would be higher. Monaco is just a tax wheeze and playground.

Norway's GDP is driven by their nationalized petroleum business (20 - 35% of GDP)