These posts have always been the hardest to write because my european history is poor and it shows. The Chinese objective story wise is to make Europe into a place that can be largely ignored while China rises and sets its domestic house in order. Securing future economic interest and keeping the peace are a distant second and third priority. So essentially it's leaving Europe to be put back together by the rest of Allies in the form of economic aide. How they do it doesn't really matter as long as they don't step on any Chinese toes. The allies and America are certainly going to work to bolster Germany's neigbors but I don't know what methods they would use to do that. France has no high horse in this timeline and is largely dependent on the British diplomatically. Economically, they're one of the countries in the best shape because Southern France was untouched. They have a larger industrial base than the Germans for the time being. As far as markets are concerned, both China and America are in agreement that the europeans, including France, cannot be allowed to run their own economic policy without approval from the Allied Control Council which is officially jointly controlled by Britain and China equally, but, nominally, Chinese interests take precedent. German industry will remain under Chinese management for an indeterminate amount of time as part of the peace deal. Chinese companies have used that right to go through the German patent office. The patents, drawings and physical equipment taken in Germany included such items (or drawings for) as electron microscopes, cosmetics, textile machinery, tape recorders, insecticides, a unique chocolate-wrapping machine, a continuous butter-making machine, a manure spreader, ice skate grinders, paper napkin machines, and other technologies-almost all of which were either new to even American industry or at least far superior to anything of use in the United Slates. Access to German technical innovations and patents is a large carrot that the Republic will dangle to get foreign companies to open factories in China. China is also keen to get as much human capital out of Europe as they can in the form of professors and industrialists. Western companies don't really need much prompting; I imagine they're salivating at the size of the potential Chinese market and the cheap manufacturing costs.
How much of Eastern Europe's poor post war performance was due war time devastation or to the soviet admisnistration. Take the income per capita of East Germany in 1955 and compare it to the per capita income of west germany and find the "communist domination" economic penalty. In this timeline, Eastern Europe outside of the Soviet Union is not signicantly more devastated than Western Europe.
Also on that wikipedia site, Europe's population in 1950 was 547 million while China's was 565 million.
The way I write it, China will try to replicate the economic success of the Deng Xiaoping era much earlier and without the baggage of communist destruction of human capital i.e. make the 1990's come sometime in the 70's. How high tech they can get is going to depend on how much the Europeans want to stay in China in the post war period, (there has been no mass flight of foreign companies without Japanese occupation of the coast or civil war) and how much know how can be extracted from the Japanese and the Germans. (China still controls Japan as a puppet.) High tech industries will lag behind in general but they will probably dominate in one or two key areas. (China and Germany led the world's synthetic oil production and China now has all that research and no one else does. The highly advanced Chinese rocketry program will probably foster a few civilian applications as well.) Just as Taiwan manufactures 80% of the world's computer chips, China can probably corner the market on at least one high tech industry arising from war time research.
I think you're selling the Chinese universities a bit short. It's not the quality that hurts, but the quantity. Beijing University, Tianjin University, Jiaotong University and Qinghua have foreign faculties and have been operating for a few decades and are certainly on the level of a good public university in the USA. Chen Ning Yang and Tsung-DaoTsung-Dao Lee are both getting their degrees in physics at these universities in 1944 before going to america on Boxer scholarships to share a nobel prize in 1957. The best and brightest of China have opportunities to go to these schools and can reasonably travel to Europe or America for graduate work. The problem comes from how few modern colleges China has. Sichuan province is bigger in area and population than France but it has only one modern college right now. In China, the top .01% can get a decent secondary education, but there isn't volume to handle the 99.99% of students below that.