So? Even if bad metrics push the inevitable a few years down the road it's still inevitable. China will become the dominant world power some time in the next decade or so and there's not a whole lot we can do about it.
In my uneducated opinion, theres lots of factors. However, economy/wealth is by and far the largest one, because almost everything else seems to have a price tag.
China has 4x the population the US does. The US won the cold war because it had a larger economy, partly because it had a larger population. That's not how any future conflict is going to shake out