When folks say "China has this" or "China would do that", you need to say "Xi Jinping has this or would do that" since he runs China with the same hand that Hitler did Germany and Stalin did the Soviet Union. Like every other dictator before him, he doesn't give a frying phuck about his people, only his power and expansion of it.
If he sees a weak opponent giving him an opportunity to take more, he will. For decades the Chinese government before him knew they couldn't take on the US military so they slowly bought our government and corporations. Now that those are owned our own government, assisted by the media, Big Tech and every other woke idiot, is destroying our military more efficiently from within than any military force could ever do in an open assault. Once Xi sees us as militarily weak enough, he will make his move.
The Chinese armed forces military have historically been [bleep] on quality but they made up for it by an overwhelming quantity, same as the Russians in WWII - ask any Korean veteran who faced human wave attacks. And let's not let hubris blind us to the fact that maybe, just maybe, they do know how to make some decent stuff for their own use as opposed to what they make for retail sales at Walmart. In war, all you need is "good enough". Even if their missiles have a 50% failure rate, if they launch 100 then 50 get through. And remember also that they did just land an unmanned vehicle on Mars, they didn't do that with coolies pulling rickshaws.
I don't doubt that Japan's military and the US military are still miles ahead of the Chinese. We have lots of combat vets in the NCO corps and the middle officer ranks but they are being led more and more by ass kissing politicians in the upper ranks. They are becoming "lions lead by jackasses" as the British military was in WWI.
The West has always suffered from an enormous case of hubris when confronting the Orient. Given an all out effort sch as WWII we prevailed but even then it was at the expense of very bloody lessons learned. Given an artificially limited effort as in Korea and Vietnam results weren't so successful. And in those latter two cases we were fighting a technologically and logistically inferior foe with no theater wide air offense, China would be the first enemy we or Japan has faced in 76 years that could field modern air power to support a well supplied army.
The future is always uncertain but I can easily see Xi Jinping starting WW III; his personality, the state of his military and the moral weakness of his enemies - partly perceived but mostly real - are ripe for it.
