China is still not in the same class. The ships that they can deploy to the region are weak in strike and area air defense capability. And they don't have much in the way of intelligence gathering that would be needed to employ those ships effectively. The most that the PLAN could manage would be to escort small convoys as a defensive measure.
And the PLAN has 25+ Type 052D destroyers w/ 64 VLS cells apiece [0]. And HQ-9 (reverse engineered Patriot SAMs) and ground attack capable YJ-18 cruise missiles in them.
They absolutely have the capability, if they weren't busy bullying their regional neighbors in the South China Sea, who have vastly less capable warships (if any blue water).
It's easy to copy and paste numbers from Wikipedia, but that tells us nothing about actual combat effectiveness. Most of the PLAN experience lately consists of harassing Philippine fishermen. It's questionable whether their missiles even work.
