The 'yellow peril' aspect of it was certainly disgusting.
If you know how to ride a media wave, you literally can't lose in today's media landscape (mixed metaphor, I know).
Ideology is just the trash can we are all eating from.
IE, you would need to also assert that Western companies having these data is no better than Chinese companies, an opinion which is hotly debated and not at all settled.
I may have missed your overall point though - would you mind being explicit about it?
In 1910, I'd absolutely attribute focus on China to racism. Today, if I were to rank the biggest threats to US for the coming decades, I would put China in distant first place. But I'm no geopolitics expert, am I missing something?