I highly recommend this book to get an idea of what China has been doing for the last 23 years:
unrestricted.pdf (oodaloop.com)
Unrestricted Warfare, written by two Chinese Colonels back in 1999. I call this a "no respect bunt." After coaching youth baseball and softball for the last 10 years, I see two scenarios where teams bunt-- the classic move the runner into scoring position by sacrificing your batter, or the "no respect bunt." In other words, I know you can't defend this, so I'm going to keep doing it and putting my runners on. These two Colonels believe that it doesn't matter if they lay out their strategy-- we can't defend against it.
The kicker is the date that this was published... realize that they've been executing this gameplan for two decades. "I'm going to TELL you that I'm going to bunt... and you still won't / cant stop it."
Whether you agree with it or not, it's a very interesting read-- elements of Sun Tzu's "know your enemy..." They've done their homework on us for sure, and I would argue that they know us far better than we admit to knowing ourselves.
For me, the most eye-opening part of this book is that they appear to have taken a strategy from our Cold War playbook, and I'm honestly afraid that we're unwittingly playing right into their hands-- spending ourselves into irrelevancy. They discuss the dependency on technology extensively, and that's coming from a late-90s perspective when we were still discussing Desert Storm as the game-changer of warfare.
The argument can be made that one of the tactics we successfully employed in the Cold War was forcing the Soviet Union to collapse under the weight of its attempt to keep up with us militarily and economically. Trying to keep up with us militarily ultimately collapsed them because their economy could not keep pace with our ability to spend. The opposite perspective can come into play there as well in that we saw a perceived (or actual) advance in their capability, and we were able to out-produce them, which seems to be a common play today. We see China produce a handful of "fifth gen" airplanes (let's call it 7% the size of our 5th Gen fleet), and our military industrial complex spins into high PRF and proclaims that the sky is falling and we've lost our edge, leading for new calls to "outspend" our adversaries. That's not just the AF-- I've seen many articles detailing the "fact" that China has the largest navy in the world now. But when you look at those numbers, you see that they only have 3 carriers, none of which are nuclear powered and must be refueled every six days. I'm not discounting them outrightly, but I am contending that there's A LOT more than just numbers. But it depends on what your agenda is with respect to how you interpret those numbers.
There are hints in this publication that this is a deliberate strategy on the part of Chinese to get us to succumb to our own tendencies. Remember that one of the tenants of Sun Tzu is to win without fighting. They don't NEED to beat us militarily, but if they can get us to collapse under the weight of our own natural tendencies, that's perfect for them.
The CCP sits on a precarious perch of their own, as has been discussed extensively in this thread. Unrestricted Warfare shows that if they can engage across the spectrum, and you can take this battle plan and see that they've done just that for the last twenty years, then they can attain a significant advantage without competing toe to toe. China also has the advantage of playing the long game-- that's culturally significant throughout history. We update our approach every four years, and you can make the argument that we have a difficult time of seeing past the next election cycle, be that one or two years depending on the level of office.