At least it used to be said by China experts that the army was built to suppress internal dissent and not to repel foreign invaders, and certainly not for foreign wars. Since then China has invested heavily in rebuilding its military but I don't know how that mission of the army has changed.

China's geography, size, and population makes a foreign land invasion very unlikely, beyond some strips of land disputed with Russia and India or a tide of refugees from North Korea. Think of how expensive and difficult Iraq and Afghanistan are for the U.S.; China would be orders of magnitude beyond that.

This used to be true, it was definitely true 10 years ago. I doubt that is still true today, though. China doesn’t make these numbers public anyways so we can only guess.