China is known to have a fairly predictable patterns for bribery. Predictable bribey becomes de facto just another tax. Of course there can be occasional exceptions.

Handwaving away just one of the examples.

The last one was the Chinese Revolution in 1949.

Yes, minus some minor events like the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, Russia & China nearly going to nuclear war in 1969, Tienanmen Square... Gosh, there's no reason to think that China is at the slightest risk of war or revolution; it'd be like worrying about nuclear warfare when the last nuclear bomb used in a war was back in 1946!

Derivatives magnify noise. Compute a 5 years average.

Better yet, let's look at 1989-2011 using the FRED data on real GDP. Over 23 years, the economy increased in size by 26%, for an annualized growth rate of ~1%. This in a time period which saw, among other things, the Internet revolution start and reach maturity. Did technology really improve only by 1% Is this really consistent with your claim that Japan hit the limits of what is possible?

Japan current GDP, both nominal and PPP, are higher today than in 1989.

Use real figures. Inflation has not been 0% the entire period, and your chosen graphs aren't even being reported in yen.

The middle-income trap that didn't happen in Japan, or South Korea, or many other countries.

'Many'? Look at a ranking of real PPP, there's a great many countries well below South Korea. Above SK, it's basically oil countries, European/American countries, and tiny outliers like Singapore.