>They could win via superior manufacturing capacity and the sheer number of people they can draft into service at a moment's notice.
Even with their manufacturing capacity they don't have remotely enough boats to get a nontrivial fraction of those people to the US mainland, and the majority of those people can't swim, so they wouldn't help in taking the US mainland, a requirement to "win" a serious war. Their entire armed forces is also almost completely lacking in combat experience, and in their last skirmish (against some unarmed Indian soldiers in the mountains) 30+ soldiers Chinese tragically drowned, due to the aforementioned lack of swimming ability.
How China frames victory and how the US frames victory needn't agree, and likely wouldn't. That being said, framing victory as only counting if there is a wholesale land invasion seems odd, as I suspect neither side would want to actually do that... so who 'wins'?