China was conquered by nearly every major power at the time and divided up from the mid 19th century to after WWII. A lot of China's success came from managing to leverage their population into a manual labor force, then moving over to industrial and skill based as they are now.
Not saying I disagree, but China was the whipping boy in Asia for quite some time(Russia, Britain, French, Japan, and Germany all had parts). So saying they were never colonized is a lie. They basically got lucky the US pushed through the China Open Door policy(Only because they had no presence).