By pretty much every imaginable metric China has improved for nearly everyone (in China) for the past 50 years. Is this also true in the USA?
I don't think China is superior to the USA, but to say China is in a "irreversible decline" is ridiculous.
https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/ce/celt/eng/jmgx/jjxs/t124869.htm
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/china-economic-growth-histo...
Maybe decline is the wrong word, and collision course is a better one.
As China globalizes and becomes more exposed to the outside world, they will start to wonder why they can't vote on things like environmental regulation, or why the local factory pollutes their river but they have little say in that process.
In this sense, this is the decline. It's the CCP being undermined by their own economic liberalization.
Meanwhile I have access to delicious spring water from Alps.
China has achieved only superficial changes that will bite them in the ass in the future.
I dislike China but the US also has those issues, people are just unware of them.
Chinese has a booming middle class as well as a lot of poor people.
And the so-called top dog of the west have cities where people for years had to get bottled water because the whole city were poisoned and whole states are drying out. Not everyone in the west are as lucky as those of us with clean water. Definitely not the US.
The point remains. Tap water is by default not drinkable, whereas water in the US is (barring some exceptions).
And how did it look in the US in the 70's when it were booming like China is now? Children in plastic cocoons because the air were toxic with lead, drinking water full of crap, dead fish everywhere from dumping of chemicals in lakes and sea, radioactive waste leaking, etc.