Hit the nail on the head.Afraid of their own population? Laughable. The CPC and Xi Jinping have a record high approval rate in China. The CIA publicly confessed that China is essentially bulletproof against Western propaganda schemes to turn the Chinese people against the government because the trust in the CPC over there is so strong. The fairy tale narrative that the Chinese people are under the boot of the CPC is pure Western LARP projection because that's literally how over half the population of the USA currently feel about our own government.
Also flying drones right up against each other's borders is not "what superpowers do to each other" because China have never done such a thing to us, nor have post-Soviet Russia. Only we do stupid things like that. We are constantly pushing the limits of China's patience because we have no solution to counter the multipolar shift besides nuking them.
You're right about one thing, we are indeed afraid of China. We're afraid of them because their economy is growing faster than ours thanks to real industrial development whereas ours is on the verge of collapse because of QE and other post 2008 bandaid fixes.
We're all being lied to about China. Big time.