That is what makes this election cycle so important. The enemy of tomorrow for China isn't the United States. It is Taiwan. Vietnam. The Philippines. And in the future, when domestic energy resources dwindle, Russia will become their next target. China doesn't want to fight us; they want to do whatever is within their power to keep us out of the fight so that they can secure their future of a unified "China."
I dunno about that. In Russia you have people called Vatniks
https://weirdrussia.com/2014/04/05/vatniki-meme/
https://archive.vn/AtYns
Now the problem with your model of China is that it assumes the whole system is rational. Actually, human societies aren't at all rational. It's easy to imagine the following scenario.
1) The government is committed to taking on Taiwan and if necessary the USA. They set targets for stuff like F-35 lookalikes.
2) The people making the lookalikes managed to put something together. They know it's unusable but they tell the people above them everything is fine because it's very bad for your health to say anything else
3) Fucking globaltimes.cn tells the public about how China is a peer competitor to the USA.
4) Millions of vatniks are emotionally invested in China number 1. If the government backs down it will face vatnik rage for its treason
5) The government talks tough on Taiwan and threatens the USA
6) The USA stumbles a bit. A pandemic, riots, and a corrupt politician who has told China he's willing to sell out Taiwan
7) China makes a move. Japan sends ships. China sinks a Japanese ship and the US/Japan mutual defense agreement kicks in.
8.) China strikes at US airbases in Japan to try to sabotage the US war effort
9) At this point China is in a shooting war. Only now does it discover it's weapons developers have severely lied to the politicians about how effective the weapons are.
There are precedents for this China built some knock-off Su-33s which are called
flopping fish in the Chinese media for their crappiness. Hell the pandemic was probably caused by China trying to build its own copy of the CDC. The people setting up the biosafety level 3 labs told the people at the top everything was fine and yet
they were not.
It's the Chernobyl syndrome. An authoritarian regime has unrealistic technical goals. It sends some non-technical but politically loyal manager out to yell at people until they say the goals are met even though the technical people know they are not. Actually, if you read Feynman's report it seems like NASA had something a bit like this leading to the Challenger disaster. The engineers at the bottom knew there were loads of issues but the managers pushed them to say they were all solved. The difference is that in an open society this gets found out. In the USSR or PRC, it never does. Mentioning military secrets is punishable by death and those managers will threaten their underlings with this to keep shit covered up.
tl;dr - is China dumb enough to take on the USA? Yeah, it kind of is. Ordinary Chinese people may be smart but the PRC is not a smart entity, much like Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and Saddam's Iraq were not smart entities. All of them thought they could beat the USA, and they all lost.