I would suggest its unilaterial claims of territory (South China Sea, Senkaku islands) are something of a statement of intent. It's military is limited... currently. In thirty years time, it might not be.
China's claims are certainly spurious, but I'm dubious as to whether that's a statement of intent on a global scale.
I'm hardly an expert on Chinese culture or history, but from what I've read, China's generally been an insular civilization. It's certainly exerted influence over its neighbours, but it's never had the dynamic expansionism that we've seen in other civilizations, like Europe, the Arabs, or the Mongols. I know that China is recovering from what it calls "The Century of Humiliation," but does that translate into expansionism? So far, not beyond its own backyard, so to speak. One can certainly criticize China's so-called debt trap diplomacy," but that isn't the same as using hard power in the way the US has over the 20th and 21st centuries.
Also, if we're talking about a scale of thirty years, truth be told, the issue of climate change does come to mind more readily than China does. Part of the reason why I'm wary of trying to contain China is that we need the US and China to lead on the issue. That isn't letting the world off the hook, but what these two countries do over the next few decades could set the trend for centuries.
My general position is that countries can try to stay out of the games of major powers, but in the end, they get sucked in anyway. In a worst case scenario, they're like the Netherlands, Denmark or Norway in WW2 and get stamped on just because they're unlucky enough to be in the way or a power thinks they might decide to take sides, or even just that it wants what they've got and thinks it's easier to take it. The best way to avoid being coerced is to impede a potential aggressor growing so powerful that one day it'll be in a position to do so.
That's true, but I'm not sure if the analogy holds.
Could the US and China fall into a Thucilides trap? Yes, potentially. But China isn't Nazi Germany. And while I almost fell into a WWI analogy here, I'm not sure if that's the case either. I mean, the US has an ally with Japan, but Japan doesn't really project its power outward much. The US has an ally in South Korea, but that's mainly in the context of keeping North Korea at bay. China sort of has an alliance with North Korea, but it's struck me as a begrudging one, with China wanting to prevent North Korea from collapsing to prevent a flow of refugees. Apart from that, China sort of has Russia, but Russia these days seems more interested in eastern Europe and the Middle East - two regions that China doesn't seem to be interested in. So as powerful as China is, it's reasonably isolated - like, there's no equivalent of NATO for China and Russia. And then there's India, which is also a rising power, but seems to be mainly interested in Pakistan, Khasmir, and, I dunno, Hindu nationalism (if anything, Modi arguably has more similarities with Hitler right now than Xi, though thankfully he's not nearly as far down the road).
Point is, China's ambitions right now are mainly regional. And I'm not sure if the power dynamic of the 20th century can apply to the 21st, in that the first half of the 20th was largely the hegemony of European empires, and the second half was the Cold War. In the 21st though, there's no one dynamic that dictates the global order. Like, we're talking about China and the US right now, but is that going to matter to the people of the Middle East, who have to deal with the Iran/Saudi Cold War, Yemen (an extension of that cold war in a lot of ways), the Syrian Civil War, and Turkish nationalism? Arguably not.
