It can work the other way round too.
China was atheist and Communist when Mao Tse Tung took over. And it was literally a sh*tole then, a lot worse than it is now. Not saying they are not a sh*thole now, just that things were much worse back then.
You have Kyrgyz republic which is atheist and a sh*thole.
You have Indonesia, Benin, Burkina Faso which are sh*tholes, too.
China is THE LEAST impressive of the East Asian countries in its development process.
Name any objective transparent index, it trails its Oriental peers by a wide margin, despite 4 decades of bonhomie with the West.
Apart from China's size, there is nothing impressive about China's very very ordinary achievements. A lot of hype aside, of course.
To put things in perspective, you have a country that is more than the size of the EU and USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand put together, that even after four decades is poorer than Slovenia.
The result of atheism in China, perhaps? Using your line of argumentation?
All three of them sold their souls to the West.
Turkey begs and implores Europe for membership for decades. Sorry application is rejected.
Turkey still comes with a begging bowl in hand to improve its standards of governance and living because it has no other alternative.
If you did not know, Turkey sold its soul to the West by aping European laws and customs, traditions and values. It ditched Arabic based alphabet for Roman based alphabet. Because (1) it is intellectually deficient enough not to invent an alphabet for its own nationality and (2) because Arabic brought no benefit that Roman based alphabet would not.
Turks forcefully banned headgear in public offices but allowed perversions and nudity. Yet, they were always dirt poor and always dirt poor. They are Europe's Mexico, in a way.
Just like Turkey is Europe's Mexico, China is the world's Mexico. It sold out its Confucian culture for the rotten notion of Communism, which as you rightly pointed out, was developed in the West. Copycats in Russia or China or the Orient can only ape their superiors in the West, that is the maximum extent of their intellectual development, as its proven before again and again. Then, it backstabbed its brother in arms the Soviet Union for a warm embrace with the USA. If that were not enough, when the US pushed for sanctions at the UN on Iran and North Korea, China meekly complied. In the last two decades, I can not think of a single major international agenda on which China stood steadfastly against the USA alone. That is because it has sold its soul, its women sell their bodies all over Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Dongguang, Shanghai, Qingdao and you name it and its bureaucrats send their children and family to the West for emigration because China at the core is rotten.
Despite 40 years of opening up, in every measure of objective development and progress, China feels more comfortable comparing with India than with Japan. That sentence tells you everything about the cataclysmic failure that has been PR China.
Saudi kingdom is more of the same. In alliance with the UK it came to power. Changed boss to the US to prop up the petro dollar system. And its occupation of your two holy sites means US can control its Saudi stooges to steer dumb and illiterate Muslim masses' anger and emotion towards any direction it wants.
None of these three countries are independent.
You talk like China has achieved some sort of a miracle when except for size or scale, there has been just nothing extraordinary, nothing whatsoever, that China has achieved. Pathetic for a homogeneous country that is bigger than any other continent in the world, in population, suckling off the American teat for so long.
