Your 3 is really conflating two different things.

There’s a long list of countries that industrialized more quickly without suffering such internal economic issues. The USSR and China suffered because of poor governance not industrialization.

Second, Mass literacy occurs via teaching kids. It has little to do with what the wider economy as seen by both modern and historic literacy rates.

It’s been 65 years since the Chinese famine, what actually fixed the country was economic reforms. MAO’s death helped but the system simply didn’t work so they tried something else.