Ask Lemmygrad

I wouldn't call their policy passive. It's respectful of self determination and mutually beneficial whenever it can be, but they're still willing to be defensive and retaliate in tariffs against the US, and they still work on R&D for things like weapon tech. I'd argue it just looks passive in relation to the standard set by colonizers as active violence and intimidation being the only means to achieve anything.

That said, even from a cynical power standpoint, most countries in history don't benefit from active war. Look at the losses the USSR suffered from WWII and how poor of a position that put it in. Meanwhile, the US has never had to deal with a major war on its soil from a foreign adversary (unless I guess you count the original "revolutionary" war formation of it?) and it has been able to dodge a lot of the direct damage from a war by using proxies whenever possible. This is one reason an alternative like BRICS is so important. It links China up with other countries in an interdependent relationship, so that China cannot be isolated and sniped at so easily. As long as China is able to continue to build on this form of interdependent power, they should be able to avoid most need for hot war, by shifting the balance toward sovereignty, against imperialism, and by extension make it all the more difficult and complicated for the empire to keep its hold. The empire won't want to go down without a fight, but the more it loses its logistical hold on all the various tendrils, the harder it will be for it to do that fight without serious damage to its core. So then you see stuff like Trump admin and Biden admin before him trying to reaffirm the tendrils, whether more subtly or through threats and intimidation, and some of it appears to work for a time at least. But the anti-imperialists of the world, well they will have to make sure that doesn't last.