You forget some characteristics of China's political economy that make their quality of life improvements way bigger and are not accounted for in this story. For example, the unprecedented investment in clean energy is seamlessly (compared to the west at least) followed by improvements to the grid. The central planner knows the plan, so he can account for the infrastructure necessary, which is not true for capitalist countries. The USA is laughably behind other powers in terms of basics like mass transportation and energy partly because of this coordination issue. No need to get started with how ahead China is with internet infrastructure, too, right?