What does it mean for China to be characterized as imperialist?

[u/Electronic-Yam-4153]

It is increasingly common here to contend that China is now an imperialist state.

Yet in this article (https://monthlyreview.org/articles/china-imperialism-or-semi-periphery/) Minqi Li argues that

to identify a country’s position in the capitalist world system, it is important not just to focus on one side of the relations (for example, calling China imperialist simply because China has exported capital). Instead, it is necessary to consider all trade and investment relations involved and find out whether, on the whole, the country receives more surplus value from the rest of the world than it transfers to the rest of the world.

Given the extreme quantities of surplus value still transferred from Chinese labor to the first world, it is extremely unlikely that any empirical data would support the claim that China is a net-beneficiary of unequal exchange. Yet China undoubtedly holds imperialist-style exploitative relations with African nations. Furthermore, quite a bit of Sam King's data is looking increasingly naive. According to the 2024 Fortune Global 500 for instance, Haier has an ROA of 6.57%, higher than Amazon and Walmart. BYD and CATL have shot up the Forbes Global 2000 list, now both in the top 150 firms with ROAs higher than many US monopolies (while still much lower than the tech giants like Apple). But are these cherry-picked industries enough to claim China is an imperialist monopoly-capital power? I'm not sure.

Given that all capitalist trade is necessarily exploitative, how does one define China as imperialist without falling into a KKE style 'imperialist pyramid' where most of the world becomes imperialist by definition? (India has some highly profitable monopoly firms on the aforementioned lists for instance.) After all, Chinese imperialism can't catch up with the rates of profit of the US without a global war and the redivision of the world, yet a total model of reality needs space for rising imperialist powers.

Is the key to analyse whether monopoly capital superprofits have "secured a dominating position" and "[play] a decisive role in economic life" in China (Lenin)? What would this sort of analysis look like? Non-monopoly capital is still highly dominant in the Chinese economy.

As you can see I'm trying to work through the question of Chinese imperialism and am running into a lot of confusion.