Consider that their govt calendar is primarily organized around 5-year plans, that they apparently have 100-year plans (and possibly even longer), and have many long-term plans such as the 'belt and road initiative'.

Even if they didn't originally conceive of it as a plan before Nixon/Kissinger's 'opening' (i.e., the original opportunity sort of fell into their lap), we can be quite sure that once they recognized the opportunity, they have made very careful long term plans to exploit it.

We can also observe that these plans are being diligently executed now.