Yes they are catching up. Three quarters of the countries in the world are catching up -- or trying to -- the most advanced countries, and that's been roughly the situation since the industrial revolution. The difference is that China has been more successful than anyone else at catching up; to the best of my knowledge no other country has ever managed as good a performance (except for poor countries that discover oil, which doesn't really count).
The War on Terror, foolish and wrong-headed though it has been, can't be placed on the same footing of destructiveness as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Not by several orders of magnitude. And you have to come through Stalinism and the Holocaust en route to making that comparison, so let's keep things in perspective here.
I guess I was responding to "hunting down sparrows and enemies of the state" rather than the revolution specifically, so I will accept they are in a different league.
Still, I'm not sure killing around 3% of Iraqis is something that can be dismissed as "foolish and wrong-headed" either.
As misguided as the Patriot Act is, it pales in comparison to the Great Cultural Revolution and other acts of horror insanity that devastated China after World War II.
They are catching up to status quo. Mostly because they squandered the previous decades scientifically hunting down sparrows and enemies of the state.