Does that really work? Can you enslave the world by buying other countries? Like "Ha, Italy, you work for us now because we own all your infrastructure!"? Wouldn't Italy just tell them to GFYS at some point, if China stops sending goods or US Dollar and just wants to get stuff for free?
In fact they are not even incentivized to do so as Chinese money is providing them the chance to build up modern infrastructure.
To make things more concrete, look at how long the EU was (and still is) dependent on Russian gas. Russia even used it to influence politics by shutting off supply to Ukraine. Poland, along with its non-German neighbors especially, have been working to diversify their supply to prevent that, but it basically took the war in Ukraine to push Europe in that direction (and even then, reluctantly; take Germany for example).
Or consider the case where your economic partner is much larger economically (like US in relation to Mexico). Who do you think has more weight at the negotiating table? Who has more money to influence political realities? Who can take a bigger hit? There is mutual dependence, but the relationship is not symmetrical.
It's easy to say GFYS, but often difficult to do in practice. First, there has to be an alternative, second, you have to migrate to that alternative. This can be costly if not practically impossible until a contender emerges: he'll have your back against the other, but now you're their vassal, so to speak.
Some call this phenomenon "neocolonialism"; Picketty also uses the term "foreign-owned countries". You get lodged in a web of incentives. You always are.
Right now, the China-US dependent is something like: the US needs China for cheap labor and cheap goods, but China needs the US to buy all these things to fuel its economy. The balance can eventually tip and shift, however. Indeed, that's what BRICS is about.
One can argue about how "painless" it was, but I would have thought that stopping Russian gas imports within a few months would cause a recession and a lot more havoc in the economy. And I always assumed that was what Russia was counting on, Germany's dependence and thus tacit support but I didn't see much of that.
China does not have the demographics for this.
Speaking of fixed incomes, these retirees are dependent on risky investments like real estate (collapsing) and public pension schemes (about to collapse). On top of this, retirees aren’t generally the consumers of the supply chain components that China makes. Remember, they never moved up the value chain of sophisticated goods manufacturing. They got too expensive before that.