As wages rise, it will be difficult to continue the boom unless more Chinese mover into the service sector as in Hong Kong or Taiwan.
You’re right about the growing dissatisfaction amongst the Chinese populace, especially as more Chinese are allowed to travel. It’s quite possible they will follow Communist nations like Poland if they don’t get a grip on corruption, probably the Number One complaint of average Chinese.
China never really had a strong, steady central government until the Communist takeover of 1949. The Republic, established in 1911, followed a weak Qing Dynasty ruled by Manchus. The Republic was plagued by weakness as well and had to co-opt numerous warlords. The Nationalists, who arguably, won the Civil War of the 1920s were weakened by the shifting allegiances of some of the warlords and by the Sino-Japanese War 1937-1945.
China could also eventually battle against some of their southern neighbors and The Philippines for the Spratley Islands since there are natural resouces there.
Corruption has been endemic in Chinese public life since Imperial times. It will be very difficult to root out such an ingrained way of doing business.
I believe the Chinese government would prefer an imperial policy where they simply overwhelm and intimidate their potential adversaries. The means would be to create an economic and military power that her smaller neighbors could not hope to match, and then bully them into progressively greater degrees of vassalage. This is going to be a problem in dealing with the Russians, though. I doubt they will back down when challenged by the “little yellow sub-humans,” which is their favorite racial pejorative for the Chinese.