Ukraine

The CCP plans to me seem to be the longest game ever played.

Look back a few decades and see what their previous policies were to be dissuaded of that idea. In the mid 50s the leader of China (Mao Zedong) lead a purge targeting the fields of education, science, literature and art, and medicine, where intellectuals were concentrated. Execution and imprisonment were what those groups faced.

In 1958 Mao ordered the killing of all sparrows to fight famine because he thought they ate too much grain in fields. The war on sparrows was successful in wiping out most of them, and then diseases started spreading because the sparrows weren't there to eat the insects spreading disease.

China, like most nations, is just lurching sometimes forward, sometimes backwards as ideas and global conditions shift from favorable to unfavorable and back again.

It wouldn’t surprise me if their plans for world domination were centuries long by design.

The last "centuries long" consistent leadership in China ending in 1911 with the end of the Qing Dynasty. Since thing its been wildly different leaderships (a couple of revolutions) with different goals. The last ~25 years or so looks very different than the previous direction of historically.

If they wait long enough, most of the PLA will be over 50 years old