How about this?
How about we impose tariffs or other trade restrictions so that we quit sending hundreds of billions of dollars in trade surplus to the PRC, which allows them to engage in a military build-up which is going to destabilize the region?
How about we starve them to death?
How about we go back to treating them like the communists they are?
Trade-wise, I think we need to treat China the way we treated the Soviet Union. However, the problem with trying to enact a trade embargo on China is that nobody else will go along. Chinese exports to the US, at $400b, are only 7% of its $5.7t economy. And that $400b number exaggerates the value added, given that perhaps 10% of the $250 wholesale price of an iPad is composed of value added by Chinese labor, the rest being materials cost (of commodities imported from the rest of the world).
There are also factors beyond our control. The big change in China's economy occurred not in 1973, with Nixon's opening to China, but in 1979, when Deng Xiaoping, China's leader at the time, started dismantling China's centrally-planned economy. Every year after 1979 has featured high single-digit or low double-digit economic growth. The Chinese will eventually present a much more serious security problem than the Soviets because their economy is now capitalist in all but name, and they have 1.2b productive people, compared to the Soviet Union's 200m people at its peak.
As a long-time amateur China-watcher (and former Soviet-watcher), my contention is that the problem with China isn’t Communism - it’s the Chinese (much as the problem with the Soviet Union wasn’t Communism - it was Russians who viewed themselves as world conquerors). When Imperial Japan went on its world tour, its model was Imperial China during its moments of martial vigor. The Chinese put on a mask of amity during their period of weakness, but now that China has grown strong, that mask is slipping. I suspect that future historians will look back upon the Maoist era, when China closed itself off from the world, as a period of respite for China’s neighbors - a time for them to prepare for a revived China red in in tooth and claw. However, historians may also record China’s feckless neighbors (aka future provinces, in the Chinese mind) as having wasted the breathing space afforded them - all you have to do is look at their minuscule defense budgets. With the exception of Vietnam and India, China’s neighbors appear to have settled upon a common policy based on (1) Uncle Sam providing for their defense and (2) fighting China to the last dead American.