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Why do you think GDP is the relevant measure of catching up with America?
It’s more relevant than PPP, that’s for sure. China is a fairly poor country, comparable with Mexico or Argentina. People have been saying that China will “catch up” to the US for years, but it’s never panned out. It’s looking like China has peaked in terms of GDP growth rate, and they didn’t even manage to achieve a Japanese or South Korean level of wealth before doing so.
It being more relevant than another measure (why?) is not an argument that it is relevant in absolute terms, and the rest of your post seems to be another assertion that China's GDP is low. I find the continuous mention of GDP in these discussions about hypothetical military clashes very frustrating, because nobody ever explains why a measure that counts the number of tokens of socially constructed value exchanged for goods and services that mostly have nothing to do with military capability has anything with military capability.
At the extreme, a country that abolished money and markets completely, stopped exporting and importing and just press-ganged its people into producing sustenance and ordnance like an ant colony would seemingly have a GDP of zero, but clearly nonzero military power...? For a real example, Afghanistan's GDP appears to hover at around $20b per year. Total US expenditures on the war are given as around $2000b over 20 years, so why did the US lose? If you think Afghanistan was somehow exceptional and the US didn't fight for real but just wasted money on nation-building or something instead, a similar calculation holds for Vietnam where it's hard to find an argument that the US didn't throw everything that they could muster short of nukes at the North.
Coming from people who are ideologically committed to the token exchange system, the whole thing really winds up sounding like "the Albigensians stand no chance against our crusaders, since their Gross Devotional Prayer index as measured by our clerics has been way behind ours for decades", "Google stock is bound to prevail over Apple because their workforce is more diverse" or any other invocation of a metric that is about goodness as measured in terms of the speaker's value system, with the gap to the question at hand being implicitly bridged by the just world hypothesis (the arc of history must surely bend towards those with superior key market indicators/Christian devotion/wokeness).
We crushed Afghanistan: one of our easiest conquests, we lost about 13 guys conquering that country. Sure it was expensive to hold onto it for two decades, but conquering it was a cakewalk. Since we have no plans to conquer and rule China as imperial overlords, the occupation costs don’t really come into it: when it comes to winning battles, bignum GDP sure did crush nonum GDP like a bug.
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