The only credible long-term deterrence to any country is threats to its homeland. That is something no US opponent has been able to do conventionally since at least the War of 1812. Nobody could even bomb the US during World War 2, making an invasion of the US homeland unthinkable. The Soviets were able to do it but only via nuclear weapons, and that's why the Cold War endured for as long as it did without a hot conflict, but it didn't stop proxy conflicts between the US and the USSR all over the world.
But China vs. the US today isn't like the US vs. the USSR in decades past. The USSR had more than a handful of allies/proxies through which it could play chess with the US. China by contrast has very few. US power projection during the Cold War was also a fraction of what it is today. It certainly couldn't "contain" the USSR by establishing a blockade on the other side of the world.
Any conflict between the US and China today is, as such, much more likely to do damage to the Chinese homeland than the American homeland. The US has plenty of bases and proxies in East Asia from which it could deal credible damage to Chinese military & industrial infrastructure. China, on the other hand, has very few ways to hit US military & industrial infrastructure. The only option is to escalate to nuclear exchange but that doesn't really favor China as China stands to lose much more than the US (more people, denser population centers, less places for elites to run).
To address this disparity, China would need a way to conventionally strike the US homeland and not with ICMBs, HGVs, etc. which are expensive and the former also vulnerable to ABMs. What it really needs as such are regional (air) bases and allies in the American continent, which is precisely what the US is most afraid of - hence why Trump moved so quickly to depose Maduro and threatens to do Cuba next. The Monroe Doctrine and the general incompetence of South American countries (facilitated by the Monroe Doctrine and centuries of US intervention) make this very difficult to do in peace time and I think it will prove to be impossible before the US is already defeated.
That leaves just one course of action - defeating the US navy. Without a navy, the US is vulnerable, as its foreign bases (and allies) rely on US fleets to provide for their defense, and the US has few options to resupply them otherwise, because it has no land routes to Eurasia. Hence you could think of degrading the US navy as almost as bad as threatening its homeland because losing the navy means losing all the buffers the US has built up to deter homeland strikes. And once the US navy is defeated, the options for striking the US homeland actually become wide open, be it via Alaska, Mexico, Canada, South America, or wherever, none of them would be able to put up a fight without the US navy. It wouldn't surprise me if the US starts threatening MAD as soon as it loses its navy, similar to what other countries would do if their homelands were in danger.
Bringing all this back to the present situation in the world where the US is bringing its considerable military power to extract concessions from the rest of the world - China's greatest deterrence against the US in any conflict is the ability to knock out its fleets (including submarines). It takes a long time for the US to rebuild those fleets, especially in its current industrial shape, and in the mean time it will start losing its regional bases. However, to truly capitalize on this you'd need to take out the US fleet without losing your own fleet and/or most of your military & industrial infrastructure. That requires overwhelming conventional power, which is one reason China is investing so much in "carrier killers." Only through asymmetry can you credibly deter the US from intervening in regional theaters. The calculus really becomes "how many carriers is the US willing to lose before it decides it's not worth it?"
