If you get enough people in your country...
You can have more of any kind of people than anybody.
Honor students are great. What do they do when they graduate? What was the last great technological innovation to come out of China? Only in the last few years is China approaching the point of being any kind of innovator instead of just a manufacturer of what other people think up.
It takes more than a huge population to be a success. For many years, tiny Hong Kong made most of China look pretty bad, and how big is Japan?