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I've yet to read a convincing argument for why China or the Chinese people are incapable of building an imposing global empire. It has not happened yet, which is a good reason to believe China is not currently in possession of an empire with specific qualities. Empires aren't built in a day! I would like to know the essentialist reasons why China is limited in this way due to immutable characteristics, culture, geography, etc.
Most of the Western perspective I read on this boils down to:
America also tends to avoid direct control in most of its imperial relationships and, as @Tanista wrote, was also once disinterested in far away interests. I can buy that the CPC today is not interested in certain ideological impositions as something like liberalism in the 20th century. I'm less sure this is something to bet the future on. The CPC is young and young upstarts tend to create ambitious men that shape new understandings. Romanize, Anglicize, Liberalize-- all verbs developed during a process of expansion. The broader understanding of Sinicization as limited to an economic context similarly feels overstated to me, and maybe just wrong.
Are the constraints that helped shaped a Sinocentric understanding, material or otherwise, a thousand years ago the same as today or tomorrow? Also, is it really the case that the European psyche is, in fact, the only type on Earth prone to use something understood as unpleasant coercion in a global or imperial context? I doubt this, but maybe there's a good reason to believe it. To me, ambition, inertia, and the largest navy in the world all seem like very powerful things to bet against, to assume a kind of ceiling in ambition to shape the world based on cultural vibes, history, geopolitics, or what have you.
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