From Chas Freeman's speech last month called Ceding the Future to China

The whole speech is here.

China has many problems, but most of them do not conform to those that career anti-China polemicists have predicted. China shows no sign of collapse. It is not growing old before it grows rich. It is instead growing rich through automation and offshoring those labor-intensive industries that cannot be manned by robots. Negative population growth plus steady economic growth and gains in productivity foretell higher per capita incomes for the Chinese people. Most Chinese do not share our distaste for their political system. Unlike us, China is not at war with other countries. It may yet be able to conclude its civil war through shows of force – assimilating Taiwan by making the island an offer it cannot refuse rather than through outright warfare. We better hope so. Our current mindless drive toward war with China over Taiwan can end only in tragedy for all concerned.

It is, of course, not inevitable that China’s progress toward greater affluence and global leadership will continue without interruption. Many things have gone wrong for China in the past. Much could again go wrong for it. But hoping that China will suffer unanticipated setbacks is not a strategy.

The fact is that the United States does not have a plan for dealing with the most probable scenario before us – a world in which China has returned to the preeminence of past millennia. We need to conceptualize one. This means we must nurture a realistic understanding of China and the Chinese, not indulge in spurious reasoning by analogies.

China does not seek to conquer or abridge the sovereignty of its neighbors. It is not engaged in a search for Lebensraum or foreign colonies. It has no theory of “manifest destiny.” Its “warring states” period – in which it resembled Europe or India in the viciousness of its internal rivalries – is long past. It is unlikely to follow either our path or that of other civilizations.