Samuel Hawley claims that Spain was more powerful than Ming China. Note Samuel Hawley is not a historian, his books aren't published by universities and he has absolutely no credentials in the fields mentioned. Hawley also made multiple errors all over his book trying to make Korea and Japan look more powerful and China look weak and they were exposed by reviewers who pointed out what the primary sources actually said.

Then why did mere Chinese merchants kill Spanish governor general Gómez Pérez Dasmariñas and all his Spanish guards in 1593 after he tried to force them to row their ship and then hijack his galleys, kill his son Luis Pérez Dasmariñas in 1603 and every single one of his guards and took their heads as trophies, after Luis failed in the Spanish invasions of Cambodia in 1593 and 1597. Cham merchants and Malay merchants slaughtered almost the entire Spanish force in Cambodia. Luis was the one who planned to invade China in the first place and he boasted he could conquer China with 25 men, but Chinese merchants slaughtered him and all his guards. Only the exiled Japanese Catholics and Filipinos saved the Spanish in 1603.

Then in 1662, Chinese leader Zheng Chenggong (Koxinga) on Taiwan, who was commanding a rump force of Southern Ming remnants and just defeated the Dutch East India Company, sent a letter to the Spanish governor general in Manila and demanded tribute and threatened to invade the Spanish Philippines. The Spanish governor general was so scared that in 1663 he permanently withdrew every single Spanish soldier from the Maluku aka Moluccas island colony in modern day Indonesia, permanently losing Maluku forever (the Dutch later annexed it) and withdrew from Zamboanga on Mindanao for decades, exposing the Spanish to even more intensified Moro Muslim raids as he recalled the troops to defend Manila from the Chinese. The invasion was not carried out only because Koxinga died that year.