The country is unraveling. Right now we are just in a calm moment after a year + of people being on edge.

They are trying what all empires do. Which is to find an enemy to unite their empire citizens against.

Problem is America is to far gone and run by to many old fucks that want nothing to fundamentally change.

When you build a sweatshop in China they’re reliant on you, When you outsource your industry to China you’re reliant on them

I feel like it’s the similar to their opposition to Russia. These powers are growing their influence in regions where the US used to have free reign, and there is so much operating on that condition that having it be disturbed feels like an existential threat to a wide array of interests. American hegemony is financially beneficial to a lot of people. A multi-polar world would also strip the US State of much of its “freedom of operation”. Looking at the Endless Frontier Act for example, I think it’s motivated by the anxiety about China’s chip production and how it could be leveraged against the US in a dispute with China. It’s harder to do things like the Iraq War if doing so sparks retaliation from other countries that have the political independence and economic/military power to do so.

Failing standard of living in the Imperial Core.

The US organizes its foreign policy around domination and scapegoats. China is a natural target due to a confluence of several contradictions of capitalism (and by extension, imperialism). You’ve asked the right question, though: why now?

Personally, I believe we’ve simply reached the tipping point for China’s material prosperity to threaten Americans’ sense of superiority as well as America’s ability to maintain a unipolar world order - or at least, this is what the monsters involved in US foreign policy believe. I don’t think your average American thinks Chinese people have good lives, but they’re constantly being exposed to contradictions of the idea that it’s an impoverished backwater. In addition, China is not subservient to the unipolar neoliberal world order. This is, as it always has been, interpreted as a threat to the USA itself and their idea of combating it is to villify and apply negative pressure on any country that will “listen”.

Also, The War on Terror has reached its end of life in the public consciousness.

So the US has been leaning on its propaganda arms to push all kinds of anti-China narratives in a kind of “see what sticks” approach. The hope is surely to drive negative public sentiment so that sanctions and other attempts to isolate China (the only thing these monsters know how to do) will be accepted.