It costs a lot to expand properly. Doesn't mean China can't eventually do it.
But honestly a lot of the idiosyncracies about Myanmar and NK can be pinned on China's chosen geopolitical strategy. The chief strategist Wang Huning doesn't seem to believe in expansionism at all. There is a strategic view which states China should be a high walled castle with wide moat, outside conflicts should be carried out with proxies that only get limited support, allowing the scientists inside the castle to build up much better tech than the "outside".
This viewpoint means that expansionism does not work/is not conductive to growth anymore. Instead, tech and industry are the most dominant methods of increasing national power. In some ways, the theory proves correct, because one could easily argue for example that one DJI would be worth at least 5 Iraq war victories, the Iraq war brought nearly nothing to the US in the end, despite being a perfect example of succesful tactical expansionism on the ground.
So therefore by building a high castle with wide moats and then using proxies outwards, China disrupts her enemies' growth in what matters (economy/innovation) while avoiding the pitfalls of wasteful expansionism.
In theory, there is a point of inflection where China's prosperity makes it so that all nations have to submit, or even so that it's irrelevant if nations submit or not, because the power difference in production, innovation and market share is so large that a nation like Myanmar's output would be a rounding error in comparison.
However, that's the current grand strategy, there's no reason to think it wouldn't change if a new strategist gets put in charge.
There are also good arguments that expansionism can work in China's context, namely how uplifting people from poverty creates massive growth and how the succesful uplifting of the backwards western regions powers the economic boom. One could draw the conclusion that expansionism didn't work for US because of endemic corruption letting US' enemy (China) simply outplay them for control of Iraq later on after the dust settles. And that if US was run competently, they would have gotten great mileage out of the Iraq expansion.
Personally I'm vocally for the creation of a wide China led empire, since I think it would let China continue the same virtuous cycle of uplifting poorer regions using richer regions, this time with China's core acting as the tier 1 region and third world countries acting as the 2nd and 3rd tier regions. The result will be insane, never before seen levels of prosperity in China and fair development opportunities (unlike what happens now) for the third world.
Also, nearly all these nations don't use their resources efficiently and are marred by corruption. By pooling all their resource rights into Beijing's proven competent government, these resources won't sit there and rot, they can be used for megaprojects that brings humanity forward.
I think this vision is a lot more compelling than China as a walled castle.
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