Deep and rather arresting pessimism here about the future of US-China relations from Jennifer Lind and Daryl Press:
The best hope for amicable U.S.-China relations rests on Beijing adopting a highly restrained grand strategy, but it would be historically unprecedented if it did so. China would be choosing to live within a security order managed by another great power—one with whom it has tense relations. While some countries have pursued docile grand strategies (one thinks of Australia, Canada and Japan), they have done so under the protection of a friendly, like-minded ally, the United States. In fact, two of America’s closest cold war allies, West Germany and Japan, took docility only so far. They built potent conventional military forces and, in Japan’s case, a nuclear hedge in the form of a giant stockpile of plutonium. Great powers have not entrusted their security to this degree to another great power unless they had little choice or unusually warm relations.
Indeed, a look at China’s national-security policy—its pursuit of antiaccess capabilities, its territorial claims, and discussions of claims to “second island chains”—suggests that it is (at a minimum) aspiring to be a regional great power. The remaining questions are the extent to which Beijing will confine its ambitions to East Asia (as opposed to pursuing a global strategy), and the extent to which it will tolerate U.S. global leadership or seek to undermine U.S. influence.