Initially I thought the "superpawa" thing was just a joke, then I realised many Indians just have different standards and perception of "developed". You just confirmed my previous speculation that if India reached the development of today's China, Indians would proclaim they are a developed nation ("hyperpower" by this point?). You took it a step further, developed nation at $5000-6000 per capita gdp. I mean that is one way to speed up "development".It's nothing personal just an observation.
You don't have to be rich to be developed. You need Very High HDI to be developed. If you give poor people education and healthcare, then the country will become rich eventually.
It's the same with becoming a superpower. The strongest kid in the block is the superpower. Rich and military power are not exactly proportional. Look at Russia. It is a far more powerful country than China even though it is relatively much poorer in terms of GDP.
$5,000-6,000 will keep the country poor, but the people will have a life equivalent to an advanced economy due to good governance, more or less. Check Cuba.
You see, becoming rich is up to the individual. The best a govt can do is provide facilities for education, healthcare and security.
If you build something like the Three Gorges Dam in a poor country like Somalia, the Somalian per capita income will increase rapidly, but that doesn't mean there's been an improvement in quality of life of the average Somalian.
China is not a developed country, it is a developing country. The list of future projects from national scale to local is immense and will go on for decades to come. These are not vanity projects but tasks required to be completed for China to be considered a developed nation. It currently has 30 million people living in extreme poverty. Although its making good progress with projects like building 300,000 subsidized houses (80,000 for Xinjiang) in 2018 it is at the beginning stages of its structural development post market reform (which is still ongoing). Eliminating extreme poverty only provides a good foundation for the nation, that doesn't mean China is developed, far from it.
https://defence.pk/pdf/threads/xinjiang-province-builds-80-000-houses-for-rural-poor.552475/
Having a growing middle class population and some rich people doesn't mean developed, it is just some progress.
China is a rich country with a lot of poor people. All that means is development has not reached everywhere. But then, the hukou system made that a deliberate move by the Chinese govt. China did not develop rural areas, only urban pockets. But those urban pockets are massive and that makes China developed.
Look at your car and retail sales, compare that to the US. You have enough people in China to match American consumer spending. That's more than enough for the Americans to treat you as a developed country.
CCP deliberately keeps a large proportion of the Chinese population poor through hukou. People outside can easily spot that.
I disagree with it being fair for the US to target "Made in China 2025". That initiative is the pre-requisite for China to even consider developed nation status. If China hasn't reached that developmental point it can not even pre-qualify for developed nation status. Once China has accomplished the 2025 initiative it can work its way towards becoming a developed nation after that. A big nation like China has a whole set of different challenges on becoming developed compared to one with 100 million or less people.
If that's the case, then open up your market. Make the currency free floating. Remove capital controls. Open up your services market.
As long as China does stuff for its advantage, then everything that China does will be seen with suspicion and people will take measures accordingly.