Why Is Piracy So Common in China? Confucian Cultural Traditions or Just Money?

A culture that wants to "economically strangel" another/a different civilization is not good for the world. And it puts a lie to China's claim of "peaceful rise" and "common prosperity". Seeing the ethno-supremacist behaviors clearly is a good correction for the world. Collectivism cultures typically have lower outgroup empathy, which makes them "vulnerable" to forming this kind of hostility, I guess.

The path you forsee may not even be good for China. Many other nations have falled into the trap of genetic supremacy based domination behavior - Germany and Japan. Both were also "brutally efficient". Both were stopped.

This rolls back in history as a repeated pattern (Apartheid, Spanish, Umayyad, Mongols, Sparta). All are no more. I think the future of humanity is that we are destined to be resilient cooperative mixed-race species - much to the chagrin of the ethnic puritans of this age.

Civilizations that are founded on individualism, and value-based, rather than clade-based inclusion - are probably going to be more resilient long term. In a sense the clade-based self-dealing you describe is a form of internal corruption - as its merit is bounded by genetics.

The higher empathy of individualist cultures is also an advantage, in peace and war. Collectivists have higher empathy for the ingroup than outgroup. Individualist cultures have good ToM across the groups: making them both better friends, and worse deliberate enemies to have. Collectivist cultures lower ToM for outgroups makes them more enemy-like by default, but less efficient at being enemies deliberately.