They've made huge economic progress and their growth is pretty staggering at double digits for 30 years.
There's a lot of fatalism in European media about how the centre of economic power is permanently shifting to china, but I see a lot of competitive advantages in the west vs state mandated capitalism of China.
E.g
1 They need to move up the value chain, they currently manufacture for the world but have you ever used a Chinese branded product? The majority of profits and value are at the top of the value chain, design, marketing etc. there are no chinese brands like apple, Nike, McDonalds, Ferrari, BMW, Mercedes, Microsoft, google, facebook etcetc spanning the globe even tho these companies may use Chinese labour and production to assemble products efficiently. Some commentators say this is coming next but I'm dubious, the Chinese are obsessed with cohesion, stability and unity - nit the individualism of the west that creates innovative brands at 1 point.
2 Massive corruption, google Chinese corruption, Chinese land grabs, etc which in my opinion are a break on the economy moving up the value chain.
Many other reasons I cant be bothered writing. Though China will inevitably continue to become more powerful and rich, I don't think it's at the expense of the west as much the European media claim. Lots of competitive advantages that they haven't/can't match. They may overtake the US as the biggest economy in the world, but as the Japanese prime minister said when China overtook Japan on that scale- what matters is the lives and living standards of the individual citizens not the position in national world ranking.