It is my sincere hope that someday the PRC will become a democracy, but while the Communist Party in China remains in power, I think that Mao's old axiom that power flows from the barrel of a gun will continue to hold true. As long as the party leaders and the military are in agreement and control, the people have no chance of becoming free, and the US must prepare for war in that theatre.
The worry is the Chinese Communist Party trying to stay in power, and using everything in it's arsenal to do so. They may try to trade for their natural resources, but as these resources get more scarce, coupled with huge demand at home, invading another country to secure these resources may seem like a viable option in order to keep a hungry populace satisfied. As a historian, you are aware of wars in the past fought for scarce resources. Just about every war has been fought over commodities, and the desire to secure them. The Chinese have a huge population, which is getting larger, and the male/female ratio is skewed due to the one child policy and most families desiring male children. When these men cannot find jobs or wives, they will become frustrated, and the government will have to do something with them. Women are commodities in most parts of the world outside of the West, as is land and foodstuffs. Promising the young male his hearts desire in return for military service is an age old recruiting tactic, which may seem quaint and outdated to our society, but not so much to a less sophisticated audience....Remember Adolf Hitler prating about "Lebensraum" to his people prior to WW II.
I'm not saying that these will come to fruition in the next 5-10 years, but they will eventually, as they learn Western manufacturing techniques and technologies. In the mean time, they are doing everything in their power to neutralize the only power in the area that has even a ghost of a chance of stopping whatever their ultimate aims are, namely the US. Making alliances with our enemies, getting a presence in our backyard with the means to interdict our movement, possibly infiltrating a fifth column inside the country through legal and illegal immigration. These are all possibilities. This scenario doesn't seem implausible to me