china must use diplomacy to keep good relations with neighbours and provide everything they need.
My belief is that China can check mate US easily. But China needs to grow up. So far in its existence, China has been seeking allies which the West abandones. Iran, Venezuela, Sudan, Zimbawe, Libya, Syria, North Korea, recently Pakistan and some banana republics in Africa are examples of the same. It was easy for China to get to these allies because they were anyway shunned by the mainstream world. It was easy for China to make transanctional relationships with these countries because no-one else would do it.
Also over the last decades, even US did not have a problem with China's rise because USSR was the bigger evil. But now things have changed and China needs to get out of the grey market and in to the mainstream and it will need more legitimate allies and bette relations with its neighbours.
So the allies mix needs to change. China needs to make Japan & South Korea comfortable with its ambitions in the East. That will relax a lot of pressure. The territorial disputes need to be resolved amicably. To the south, the same thing needs to be done. Vietnam should be made a friend along with other stake holders of the East Sea dispute. All this will give China a lot of breathing space an true strategic depth.
Now comes the matter of the relationship with India. For sure, Sino-India relations can be improved a lot by taking small confidence building steps. However, for that purpose, China needs to stop propping up Pakistan as its handyman against India. That does not mean that China should not cater to its interests via a relationship with Pakistan however, the canvas needs to change to an independent relationship with India where both China and India are comfortable in their skins and can trust each other of not making mischief in the respective countries via other nuisance value regimes / countries.
If China can do that, it will not have to worry about US anymore because then US does not matter. However, China needs to act assertively on this front and that too fast because the window of building trust is closing and all this un-necessary animosity could turn to permanent fissures that may define the next 2 quarters of this century.