As you point out, many factors contributed to China’s rapid growth in recent decades. Some can’t be replicated, like the demographic wave that drove expansion for a generation, but will be a drag on the next generation. Likely the Government’s long run of explosive spending on infrastructure will be financially unsustainable in the near to mid future. The low-cost manufacturer advantage is likely gone for good, and previously successful currency and trade manipulation strategies have become well recognized by other countries. Intellectual property theft profits will probably never again reach the growth rates of their heyday.
Chinese people (like Jews) tend to outperform other ethnic groups economically, in many different setting around the world. Cultural factors drive that, like the Confucian value of study, education and self-cultivation; as well as an entrepreneurial tradition, and ties of family support. That is China’s great advantage going forward.
The major determinant will of course be the Government in China, as it has been since the communist dictatorship was imposed. If the Chinese people were free of state control and Party corruption (but had stable rule of law), the boom would quickly overcome the painful adjustment that now seems imminent.
Will the Government unleash the people, fortify their cages, or be overthrown? That is the question.
Do you really think so? I googled 1980 Chinese population, and came up with the following - China: 981m in 1980 and 1,338m in 2010 (36% increase) vs US: 226m in 1980 and 309m in 2010 (36% increase).
My impression is that the countries with the fastest population growth have tended to lag in GDP per capita growth, probably because the resources of the state are not infinite. India has a literacy rate of 74% (vs China's 100%), possibly because its education budget has lagged its much faster (than China) population growth. Pakistan's poor school-age children are educated in madrassas where they spend their days memorizing the Koran and the hadiths because they can't afford school fees at government-subsidized institutions.
China would still be a dung burning rice paddy cesspool if the USA had not meddled in world markets starting with Nixon.