Wars are fought for status, sometimes, but mostly for survival and loot.
Loot may include land and tribute.
Successful leaders want more land and tribute to be able to do more, which can include more land and tribute which contibutes to more safety (survival).
Leaders may wish to be remembered, most probably do.. but it is generally a secondary or tertiary desire.
First, they want to survive.
Second, they want power, status, wealth, and everything that goes with it.
Successful war aids both of the first two desires.
[Wars are fought for status, sometimes, but mostly for survival and loot. ]
You’re thinking of war as some extreme resort. For a national leader, war is just a tool for achieving his aims, much as a mechanic uses a wrench to loosen a nut. Note that conquerors don’t want war. What they want are the fruits of war. Alexander was perfectly happy to accept surrenders - he spared the cities that surrendered without a fight. After encountering a reverse Thermopylae at the Persian Gate, he exterminated the male population of the Persian capital and sold the women and children into slavery. He was not happy at having to lose a good chunk of his men at that godforsaken pass.
https://www.livius.org/sources/content/diodorus/alexander-sacks-persepolis/
Would he have preferred a surrender? He certainly rewarded those who opened their cities to his conquering troops.
* For the past several hundred years, soldiers in the West has been fairly docile. Not completely docile, given Franco’s role in the Spanish Civil War. Outside of the West, soldiers are anything but docile. Chinese troops in particular have several thousand year record of mutinous activity up to and including the extermination of their ruler and his clan. In the past century alone, Chinese troop mutinies have resulted in dynastic collapse as well as major changes in government policy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuchang_Uprising#New_Army_mutiny
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhang_Xueliang#Xi’an_incident
In antiquity, the human and financial cost of a military campaign against a proto-Korean empire led to a coup against a Chinese emperor by a close confidant, who killed both him and all of his direct line:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Yang_of_Sui#Late_reign
In the early 70’s, a senior Chinese general attempted a coup against Mao.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lin_Biao#%22Lin_Biao_incident%22_and_death
In the late 70’s, Deng Xiaoping mounted a successful coup against Mao’s handpicked successor:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hua_Guofeng#Ousting_and_death
Less than a decade ago, the Chinese official Bo Xilai was said to have been preparing for a coup against Xi Jinping.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bo_Xilai#Downfall
Bottom line is that Chinese leaders have to worry about fending off their rivals on a day-to-day basis. Wars abroad distract them from that task. Xi Jinping isn’t doing anything of these things to survive, any more than an Olympic athlete tries out for gold medals to survive. He’s doing it to achieve personal glory for posterity, like so many leaders, Chinese and otherwise, before him.