We should first of all reframe the notion that China has not engaged in wars of colonization and conquest since its independence. It has attempted and failed in the case of Taiwan, and has also managed to frame all of its armed conflicts, save its participation in the Korean War, in irredentist terms, meaning that they are simply trying to reclaim what already was rightfully theirs. I grew up in China and in the early 90s my maps had "South Tibet" marked as Chinese, Sikkim as an independent nation, and the maritime borders extending to the shores of Brunei. My parents were both mobilized for the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese War but did not see combat because it only lasted 3 weeks, although an uncle was injured and claims to have called an artillery strike that gave him what we now know as PTSD ever since. All maps published in China kept meaningless (although shorter and easier on the tongue) Chinese names in brackets next to Russian ones in the Russian Far East. The historiography of the CCP simply is too built into the narrative that it is anti-imperialist and anti-expansionist to suddenly change course in its rhetoric. Actions are another matter, of course.

Also, notably, there's no singular American ruling ideology in terms of grand strategy, and individual opinions, even ignorant, racist, uninformed ones not espoused by elites, can have an impact. There are plenty in both the libertarian and the progressive camps who vehemently favor a policy of restraint in grand strategic terms. America did change its entire view as to the country's role several times between 1915 and 1941. China has a unified, mandated singular ideology that the state creates and makes official, sometimes for the sake of consistency the definition of words are changed to aid those efforts (like Mao redefining "democratic" and "the people" for the nation's constitution, unilaterally of course). The CCP's raison d'etre is rooted in ethno-nationalist grievance politics and just as most people in China know little beyond what's seen in the media about the US, the inverse is true as well, and so a lot of people will view the threat in a lot of ways, some blatant in its xenophobia and racism (hell, there's still a chapter in the US Code that's titled "the Exclusion of the Chinese"), some on more nuanced, ideological, liberalism grounds, some on zero-sum grand strategy hegemonic thinking. But it's important to know that CHina wants to portray itself as a bigger threat than it really is and while its citizens are quite used to and are usually cynical about officical messges the state sends out, America's lack of experience in discerning between real and embellished and conjured aspects of official lines pose a rael, atlhough surmountable, threat.

Meanwhile, ask yourself how is it that cryptocurrencies are so big in China, in spite of government efforts to intimidate founders and launch its state-backed competitor. Ask yourself how successful is the long-standing national ban of porn? Or even truly the anti-religion movement, est. 1945. China's real threat is America taking it at face value and not critically enough. They've had a lot of decades to hone messaging.