Never mind that China is one vast environmental disaster zone.

As a student of history, I see certain correlations between today's China and pre-war Germany?
There is the extremely expensive and very rapid military build up.
Quite massive infrastructure spending, with roads and rail now stretching to every corner of the quite massive Chinese empire! [Enabling the movement of arms, armaments and armies, to virtually any border, in just hours!]
Consumer spending seems to be on the rise, and still has quite massive unused,[buy China,] economic building capacity.
[Indicating a soft economic landing?}
Also, the leadership is ramping up national fervour, [which now needs to be controlled, contained and cooled,] by picking sabre rattling fights all over the shop, with near neighbours.
It's a very useful strategy, inasmuch as, it diverts attention from serous internal problems, which threaten China's leaders and or the Communist party, almost exclusively!
Rhrosty.

As Rhrosty suggests, the Chinese rulers would do well to give up on their imperial ambitions and look after the Chinese people (though as a menace to world peace they fall way behind the American colonial empire). This might involve freeing China's own captive nations such as Tibet and possibly East Turkestan.

However, China needs to go a lot further than that. Instead of massive social engineering projects, the rulers could join the rest of the developed and developing world by dismantling the prison republic and opening up to the people the decencies of democracy, rule of law and human rights that the rest of us take for granted.

China might lift a lot more people out of poverty by absorbing the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution rather than piggy-backing on its technological fruits.