there is one big difference between the two. usa (like it inherited from the british empire) is a maritime empire, it spreads across the world creating garrisons and outposts, de-facto soft-conquering creating puppets (eg israel, ukraine) whereas china has expanded to its limits already, and doesn't spread its military around, it just sends out its merchants to do business. russia is another thing again, their thing is resources and for which reason they hold siberia, where the vast majority are. almost all of the former USSR states are major producers of one or more important resources. russia and china quietly agree to not take mongolia but russia controls most of the mining there. similarly, kazakhstan is full of current and old and dirty mines of all sorts, being a big desert, lots of military experiment grounds too, a famous one with anthrax. so, they are kinda different. neither russia nor china tend to create vassals, probably you could say russia does the puppet thing and south america has a lot of that. china not so much interferes with politics. yes they are empires, all of them, and their business is extracting wealth and concentrating it for the ruling class but europe (ie, spain, portugal, france, netherlands, denmark, germany) is a maritime empire and they all have colonies where they puppet governments and extract, especially africa and south america, they are allied with uk, also maritime, and usa, also maritime. as a trio, when you include all the commonwealth, australia, canada, new zealand, much of the pacific islands, papua new guinea, phillipines, are all unified on methods, and are all maritime powers. so, yeah, the methods of the 3 maritime powers is different from the two landlocked ones. really you can also split out turkey and iran and pretty much, serbia is a stubborn little shit in the middle of europe that refuses to play vassal and is friends with russia to keep it that way... while also giving lip service to europe for some things so they'll buy all their wheat.