China may (or may not, for all I know) have beaten the West in the game of getting the technology it wants but the country has enough structural problems that it's chances of getting ahead of the West broadly are looking very dim.
Problems: Horrific pollution, huge loans to inefficient state-run industries, massive real state and infrastructure mal-investment and bubbles, losing conventional factory jobs to even lower waged centered without gaining better jobs in compensation, having a first world demographic structure (lots of old people) without a first world standard of living, a government that's resorting to repression and ideology to solve problems and so-doubling down on all mistakes, the falsification of statistics can barely conceal an economy in stasis, etc.
So, there's little to fear from a Chinese economic "juggernaut" but the decline of China poses serious problems - especially, it seems to be what fueling the huffing and puffing over the South China sea.