I doubt that could happen any time soon considering how much I laugh at the Sankaku articles on China... However, in my nihilistic world view if a country is already the second largest economy in the world (we are talking about a country that is giving financial aid to the banana republics of southern EU), has launched astronauts into space - not only satellites, has nukes, has world-class scientific researchs, etc. it's not any developing country anymore. If it has problems, it has those problems because it chooses to have them, not because it can't do anything about them like real (and poor) developing countries.
So, yeah, I won't fully accept calling this a side effect of being a developing country. It works for some unfortunate African states suffering from famine, drought, and wars where dying and dead people lie on the streets and nobody simply has the energy to do anything about them. But if the same happens in China, the only explanation would be that nobody cares. And like I said before, this happened in a town, not in some rural village that just got the electricity and TV.
Edit:
You gave the name to it. Although it's a bit grammatically fixed from your suggestion.