In my opinion, China is playing a complex strategic game.
Technical standards are a very powerful tool of influence in today's world. In some neighboring countries, even the railway tracks have different widths. Through the establishment of certain technical standards, countries fight for their influence.
Probably, China plans to draw half of the countries of the world into its sphere of influence.
And in this half of the world there will be such phenomena as social rating, closed Internet, censorship and a ban on freedom of speech.
The most impressive thing about the rise of China is that they have somehow manage to pull all of that off quite under the radar. If I recall correctly, there wasn't really anyone calling them out for aggressively buying into foreign industries and especially critical industries and infrastructure. It was first called out when it was already quite too late to stop it. Their level of influence is so high by now that refusing any deals with them comes at a high cost these days.
Many people were of the impression that they are doing their thing in China. Yes they are an export and import nation, but when you see how many ports they bought (partially) into all over the world, why did this info come up only when they had already bought into a 100+ ports around the globe? They have all kinds of agreements, some with lower and some with higher impact, but the logistical network they are building also comes with synergetic effects that improves their global political and economic power. These guys are great chess players obviously.