Pyramids and the great wall were pre-fossil fuels, electricity, and internet. Any useful research on sci-hub can be available to a person with half a mind in China. The Chinese space program has made leaps from being the third country in the world with a successful crewed space program in only 2003, and now on their trajectory to have a permanent space station in 2022 - only 19 years later.

Progress is heavily non-linear, particularly so in the last few hundred years, and very unevenly distributed due to various factors (geography, wars, resources, population sizes, etc). The way European and even North American powers developed even 70 years back is not a direct match to how countries develop now.

But you're right that it's not just a labour issue: it's also an energy issue, for power (which enabled hundred-fold ROIs compared to human work, even slave work) and materials construction (which already occurs in the countries you mentioned).
And on that note, the planned construction of nuclear power plants in China is enormous[0] (including new technologies like EPR which work well already there while they're lagging behind in my home country of France) and by the end of that their total nuclear throughput will be higher than France[1]. And renewables are also rising at a fantastic pace there too.

Now there's the current (and soon to be dated) GDP/added-value definition of "winning" from the west. Well, even there it's a steady improvement for China (more so than for India, that's for sure): over two-thirds of foreign executives were already saying Chinese companies were as innovative or more than their companies by 2014[2] and the time to market on their internal market is very different from the rest of the world due in part to entirely different approaches to strict internal processes, which leads to a very different approach to what's "new". As noted in the same article and in my previous comment, while the quality of things isn't quite on par with what the US or the EU are accustomed to, it's good enough for a market that is more than twice the population of the two aforementioned. And by sticking to that metric, one can easily say that what WeChat does in China is the wet dream of basically most of the biggest US tech companies.

I do have many doubts about what will happen to the country and its population as the middle class grows and starts asking questions and wanting a better quality of life and, you know, perhaps want no more autocratic regimes and less corruption. Perhaps that's more a hope of mine rather than a pragmatic prediction though.

I'm not sure what definitions of "winning" and "innovate" you are using, and I am curious to hear about the places where the country completely fails to innovate or "win" (this is not a sarcastic comment, I'm genuinely curious), because it's getting the world handed to it on a platter these last few years.

I don't wish for the EU to emulate in any way some of the terrible things occurring in China, and I hope that the ideals of the Schengen space and practical EU protections (that I very much cherish) will be one of those things that spread to the world eventually, but I'm not seeing a fantastic amount of "winning" happening in our democratic countries lately, from one side of the Atlantic (Brexit, rise of extremes, EU issues in Poland or Hungary, lack of collective weight on major decisions, etc) or on the other side.

edit: links, sorry about that.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/268154/number-of-planned...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country

[2] https://outline.com/szPNha (MIT Sloan Management Review)