Currency manipulation was not a strawman but my attempt to make sense of your fixation on China printing money, which remains mysterious to me.

Buying assets with a currency is not the same as backing the currency with them. Neither US nor Chinese currency is asset backed.

If China wants to buy American assets they can do so as far as US law allows. Farther than that they can do it illegally through proxies (although as I understand it countries like China and Russia do this in an ambiguous way that is not necessarily illegal).

Either way printing money has nothing in particular to do with this. The Chinese government has undoubtedly a vast budget to work with because China is a very wealthy country that has taxes. Printing money is no more or less essential to their revenue than it is for any other country as far as I know.