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Yes, it appears that some people in Chinese academia and government are first trying to incrementally absorb the nations of people who look like them. Some in China have even said that Japan should be part of China, because Japanese people left China to populate Japan long ago.

And the way some people there see it, “the Yellow River runs out to the sea” (much historical symbolism with many folk stories behind it). And so with Chinese influence. It’s part of a train of thought about past domination of China by western nations and a desire to do something similar with the West and the world. It’s a concept similar to fairness in their thinking. There is something similar to a superior race and/or superior culture line of thought there.

Racism in China is often more subtle than most people in the West imagine. It’s different. It’s much more hidden in plain sight than in the West, if you can imagine that.

[Ah, I see the Chinese are working up the master race idea...]

My impression, perhaps mistaken, is that the Chinese think of Germans, and the West, in general, the way a missionary thinks of the cannibals who have made him the main course for the evening - in a position of advantage, but not superior. They’re not particularly enamored of any of the West’s isms, except as a fig leaf for whatever domestic power play they’ve engineered.

Anyway, the master race idea is sectarian and not conducive to what they’re really into - the idea of universal empire. It’s the same ideology that animated the creation of the Chinese empire - that all men have common roots, from which it follows, in the Chinese weltanschaaung, that all under heaven should be ruled by one man, preferably the ruler of the Middle Kingdom.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tianxia

The coda to the Jet Li movie “Hero”, and the centerpiece of Chinese strategic thought? Universal peace can only be achieved upon the achievement of universal empire. The beauty of this line of thought? A philosophical strain that gives its rulers a blank check for glory-seeking in the vein of Alexander and Caesar.

In that respect, China’s no different from Russia and probably every other non-Western country that did not go through the meat-grinder of WWI. But its economy is getting to the point when its leaders have the economic wherewithal to engage in the sport of kings - territorial aggrandizement for eternal fame. If you had said to me, back in the 80’s, that China would make a claim for the entire South China Sea, an area 1/3 the size of the US, I’d say you were paranoid. But here we are.