From my understanding, China has a lot more emphasis on crew served weapons. Infantry fighting has moved towards counter terrorism so crew served weapons have fallen out of favor. But in a near peer conflict, they probably could be effective which is maybe the reason why China doesn't have a larger caliber gpmg.
In a near peer conflict, the scenarios involving infantry combat will have soldiers just calling in support to strike spotted enemy positions, particularly if they are out of range. I'm not going to talk how a war between equivalent powers will have infantry fights at the bottom of the focus compared to heavy stuff and technology.
Since a decade or so, China as reformed their army and command structure to be similar to USA, including weapon doctrines. The reason seems to be due to a war game they did with two teams representing PLA and USA respectively. The red team got their butts handed to them so hard that some of the commanders cried! They decided that the USA model would be more ideal. (Ironically to fight USA)
Proxy infantries are how modern wars are being fought. Yet, whenever a state decides to do an direct attack, they ALWAYS just use some form of ordinance, like drones, missiles or jet airstrikes. The Chinese are not different in this philosophy, yet there is a "difference". Since the end of the Korean war, the Chinese learnt their lesson, they had a big focus on mass infantry, yet had an chronic lack of firepower, leading them to invest a lot of firepower today.
We saw that the PLA has some guns designed for long range fights and penetration. The atributes of some of their guns suggest that they don't want to enfatize too much on extensive "sniping" or long range small arms combat, instead engaging targets with explosive support. Even USA is not different, their soldiers in the middle east tend to just call air support to engage enemies when they are outside of their comfort range.
"Counter-terrorism" doctrine is almost an euphemism of USA and NATO fighting middle eastern tribes. The militias lack effective body armor, which allows even small rounds to retain their wounding effectiveness even at long ranges. They also lack heavy support and anti air, which allows the West to pound them without retaliation. Crew served weapons bring heavy firepower for duking out and for sieges, but are not of much use due to their "slowness" to the counter-insurgency scenarios where the enemy "dissapears" whenever they are not in a fight, and where things happen when they decide to attack a certain patrol or outpost using a certain amount of militants for the attack. They are literally police dealing with guerrilla. It might be of use for dealing with proxies in conflict, but engaging other world powers is a completely different ball game
I'm not much of an expert on Chinese geography and geopolitics, but maybe not so much of the most likely hypothetical land combat zones will share the same characteristics of the deserts and mountains of Iraq and Afghanistan for long range combat. The exception might be Xinjiang, with the possibility of an small group of USA black ops trying to do stuff, but it will be hard for them to put vehicle support in here.
The numerous predictions for an war with China even says that USA won't even get to beach their troops on land in the end. The action will boil down to cyber attacks, missiles and ships.
The PLA infantry fighting strategy without artillery, seems to involve a mechanization mobility that allows them to get closer to the enemy to fight from a relatively shorter range.
