China has objectively way more power now than it ever had since the Roman empire era though.
They make something like 10x more steel than the number 2 (EU). And in most industrial sectors, they have majority shares. They're first in science production, and that's with the less educated older generation being most of the lead researchers instead of the young one which recieved first class education. In terms of automobiles, they also have the largest production capacity by far.
Through brute force ability to invent and create, China is here to stay, one way or another. That doesn't mean a good ending is guaranteed for China, it just means that the country is too big to fail. Kinda like how Germany from 1910 to 1950 got completely shit on multiple times and still became powerful in the EU in the end, through sheer size and industrialization, except even Germany was nowhere as big.
What ideology type China will follow as the world's premier power, how much of its power it will be forced to share, and how many bodies will be dropped on the way, those are the main things that will be determined by the cold war.
History has nearly no examples of a smaller economy with less population defeating a larger one on a societal level. And the fact that China has nukes means that they cannot in the first place be completely defeated even if the conventional forces existed.