My thoughts on the matter.
4 The chinese army as a whole is very effective when fighting by the book, but suck when it comes to commanders taking the charge and pressing a attack without first checking in the General.
5 This is just a act of them being the bully. They are acting big and tough, but they will be fools if they actually believe it. They feel like western society owes them.
Actually this is incorrect, Chinese Army doctrine allows its commanders to make decisions on the go, not requiring to go up the chain of command - far different then many nations which allow them to be a better in the combat role then one would think. The biggest problem they have is mobiltiy,
while they do have impressive new toys, they still lack basic tools like GPS in their fighting equipment. In the Gulf war what helped us was having FF's on everything, to avoid friendly fire and still we suffered some friendly fire accidents - something the Japanese have on just about every piece of equipment and the Chinese do not. What this means if a Chinese naval ship decides to move in on its own and its not identified it can be blown out the water on accident - which is most likely will happen and blame the Japanese.
Secondly, its not them being bullies - this has been going on for over 40 years now. Chinese Taipei, Taiwan, South Kroea, Japan have always shown they improved over 100% - the Philippines is coming along but not good as the rest. China is basically showing its hand in a growing economic and political sense as it hasn't done before.
Problem is 20 years ago China would have absolutely no chance in showing its hand like this, now with the economic strength and its military being upgraded - they are coming out to play with the rest of the world to show its power.
Either way it can be bad news for Asia - unfortunately I don't know what is going to stop the big red machine.