The People's Republic of China is a revisionist aspiring superpower in east Asia, one of the three great industrialized areas on Earth, structured as a Han Chin

The People's Republic of China is a revisionist aspiring superpower in east Asia, one of the three great industrialized areas on Earth, structured as a Han Chinese ethno-nationalist state. To make matters worse it aims to seize hegemony over east Asia and to dominate the Western Pacific. This directly implicates the United States as currently most of the non-PRC states in that region are either treaty allies of the USA (Japan, Australia, South Korea) or significant economic powers that provide many crucially important goods to the US (Taiwan, Vietnam). Furthermore, the PRC is embarking on a naval expansion only rivaled in history by the buildup of the German High Seas Fleet in the 1900s. This combines both a grand strategic objective (regional hegemony) with large-scale active efforts to acquire the tools to achieve that objective. Finally, the last piece of the puzzle; The US and other western powers have not faced any major war since 1945 because of atomic weaponry. However, the atomic posture and grand strategic situation between the USA and the PRC is far different from that along the Iron Curtain during the Cold War. Both the US and China have nukes yes, but both only have strategic weapons, and those would likely only be used in a situation where the existence of the state was under threat. A war for dominance of the western pacific and east asian hegemony would not be an existential war for either power. This paradoxically makes a hot war far more likely than it was in West Germany, where tactical nuclear weapons were written into the battle plans from Day 1. Combine that with a Chinese state facing a "Now or Never" moment to attempt to achieve their grand strategic objectives as their demographic crisis approaches and the US rearms after 25 years of the unipolar moment, and the late 2020s and early 2030s are looking extremely dangerous. American elites are not stupid and understand this full well and this is why, in the past decade, anti-PRC sentiment has become universal across party lines. Ideology plays a relatively small role in this (beyond of course the fact that the PRC ideology has made them a revisionist power).