Ok here's the thing about china it has a whole lot of structural problems.
China's one child policy started 1979 its been about 40 years since then and China is running out of 30 year olds, 20 year olds and every thing under that, and no China cant fix that because men are required to take care of their parents people decided to focus on boys which means men outnumber women but it gets worse because when china urbanized the men mostly stayed behind to do all of the hard rural labor and women moved into urban centers which means that the two sexes are further separated by geography.
It gets worse the CCP's policy towards economic growth is to take the entire countries savings pool it all together and then point it at any company that promises jobs. It doesn't matter if your company is successful or if your competent if you can create jobs and your Chinese good for you here's the money. Thing is after doing this for decades china is now the single most overleveraged country in human history. They have a subprime crisis in the making that makes our look like a sad joke.
It gets worse.
China has paved over their farmland and put the three gorges damn smack dab in the center of their best river and on top of this have poluted things like crazy. China deals with this problem by having their farmers put in more imputes into their farming then american farms would dare use because of cost issues. This makes China more dependent on middle eastern crude then any other nation on the planet. To get this crude big massive slow moving oil tankers must go past a series of hostle island chains, go bast India a hostle country thats at the very least a regional power if not a great power go to the middle east pick sides in a centuries long bloodfeud then get their oil past India, past that hostle island chain and back to china.
If this oil supply is cut off and it can easily be done at the source, india and the island chains the Chinese people do not recieve the oil. This causes their industry to fail, this destroys China's farming capability when it is already unable to feed China as a whole with out imports. It gets worse.
China because of its aging population can not possibly have their domestic economy absorbe all of their exports they need countries that they can dump goods onto. The problem with that is that the EU is aging too and has become an Export union. Russia doesnt have enough money to do it. India is a closed economy, Africa's governments are a pain in the ass and the only country that can continue to absorb their goods is the United states and the US had 30 years of built up beef with china before Covid. By the way there is no friendly political party to china the democrats are if anything even more hostle to china then then Trump is.
If China cant dump their goods, their economy melts down, thats why all of the smart money has been fleeing china for at least 10 years now, why china is locking down all of the things and installing a system of social control that has George Orwell complaining about plagarism.
Then Covid hit the scene, and it shut down entire sections of the chinese economy. The fact that they lied about it and let the pandemic spread has managed to deeply enrage the hostile island chain they need to get their oil through. It has...oh man if you have been watching indian news the Indians are Livid about this crisis. A lot of Indians are going to die and those fingers are all pointed at China. Then the Chinese decided to deflect by blaming the crisis on Italy which pissed off the EU, then as americans entered full panic mode they blamed the americans for the virus.
Which no one belives but has managed to ENRAGE people like crazy on top of this they have proven themselves to be an unreliable supplier so the Americans, Japanese and others are pulling their industry out of china when ever possible and building it closer to home. America is currently going through one of the biggest reindustrializations in its history.
These are all of the issues at play before a shooting war with china begins.
I wouldnt bet on china to win this one.