China is a deeply rotten society. If you have any criticism towards the ways of the Communist Party, you'll simply disappear (whatever that means). Under Xi, China starts to look more and more like a "little" North Korea. If the Chinese people are ok with that, I have no problem. Just don't try to export your dumb communism to the West.
Why they have so much money? Because the whole world has moved production in China, because we're greedy and we can't live without a 200% margin on each Iphone sold. In the last 30 years, almost every product sale in the world contains a small amount of money that goes to China.
On the other hand, India is much poorer, but is a healthy society. Your voice, no matter how big or small, has a chance to be heard. There's corruption, there's excess, there's intelligence, there's freedom. It will take a while for India to catch up as a whole, but in terms of social health, India is way above China.
If you wonder why Covid-19 happened, then find out why Chernobyl happened. It doesn't even matter how it started, it's important how it was handled at first. I will only say that the first reaction of Chinese authorities was to arrest doctors and think about an American bio-attack (see the case of dr. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang).