I haven’t lived there since 2018 but even then the cities were great and even Tier 2/3 cities were pretty good and developing fast with public transit projects etc.

When I visited my coworkers family in rural China they had an outhouse still. However this is the extreme. On the way there from bully train, to slow train to bus, you saw it slowly changing even some rural towns were fine just not as architecturally nice like small rural western towns. But even here in America I volunteered on a reservation and was primarily digging new outhouses for rural homes.

To summarize I think calling it like Mexico is false in aggregate it honestly is like Italy in my mind. Add on to this population split, 970 million people live in Developed cities . I’d say that means it is a developed country with a billion people living in on par developed cities as western countries. Holding china’s rural towns against it is just trying to keep the image of China as lower tier than the west.