> they are still definitely doing better at strategic scale resource allocation in apples to apples comparison

There's zero evidence to support your claim.

The boom that the last 30-40 years of global trade and their joining the WTO produced (ie filling in the extreme slack in their economy), just as well may have papered over immense inefficiencies and wasted uses of resources during the boom phase.

The next 10-15 years will be a far better judge of how good the Chinese bureaucracy is at managing intricately via command & control economics. When you have hyper fast growth and vast slack to fill in, you can afford a lot of mistakes - which mostly go unnoticed. So far it's not looking good, in just the span of one decade they've become the world's most indebted nation as a means to continue faking their expansion. They've found they can no longer grow their economy acceptably without rapid debt expansion. The bureacracy keeps rolling from one looming asset disaster to the next trying to keep it all propped up, while households load up on debt at record pace. Sounds a lot like some of the more foolish financial mistakes made in the West over the last few decades.

When you have to lock-down nearly all capital from leaving your nation, you know something very bad is happening in terms of resource allocation. Don't confuse temporarily having a bonanza of resources to spend, with being brilliant at how you spend it, they're two different things. As the slack has filled in, their having to turn to extreme debt to continue on the path they set indicates they've made structurally incorrect choices. That rapid debt acquisition means the clock is running out on their former approach. They can't come close to accomplishing what they want to with the resources they actually have to spend, so they've switched to borrowing very aggressively from future output (a future with a rapidly declining worker base to pay for it all), which is an indication of incompetence at resource utilization.

The Belt and Road is a flailing, expensive mess so far. It's more likely to end up as the world's most expensive boondoggle.

Their biggest industries - such as steel, iron, aluminum, cement, etc - are mostly examples of incompetence at resource allocation. They've been over-producing to a great degree in their state-controlled industrial segments for a long time. There's nothing efficient or prudent about it, it's a very expensive way to run industries (instead of shifting those resources to where they're needed for sustainable growth, versus subsidizing unneeded production).

I'll take Germany, Sweden, Norway, Australia, Denmark and Canada against China any day of the week in terms of effecient resource allocation for the betterment of society. Not to mention those nations all have tremendous protections when it comes to human rights. The standard of living and quality of life is astronomical at the median in those nations compared to China.

China still has half a billion people living on $5 per day or less. They have around 250 million people living on $3 per day or less. The bottom half billion people in China are among the poorest people on earth, and have among the fewest human rights. Human rights are a required top-line consideration for social well-being.