^Are you honestly saying you haven't noticed an escalation of Chinese rhetoric and a co-opting and mirroring of the language of Trump and friends? Go back and sample the rhetoric when time permits. I'll see if there are any discourse analysis studies on it, but I think if you look back what I'm saying will be borne out.
Pick up any text on Chinese discourse and this style of puerile rhetoric will be viewed as shameful, so I have strong doubts it's endemic, and even less so in the halls of diplomacy. The belief that braggadocio is part of Western success is widely held in Asia, so that might be part of it ('they keep beating us at the global PR game; perhaps we should use their approach?'), but it looks more like an organised plan to me.
Let's also not forget the roots of the present dispute can be found in Bush's 'containment' policies, which went unscrutinised due to his multiple other disasters. China warned about this for years in a diplomatic tone, and it fuelled great resentment and indeed was central to the rise of Xi and his party wing.
Back then, in the face of 'the dirty Chinese are taking our jobs' racist insult, Chinese diplomacy used mutual benefit and even charm (see this comment from someone at the time from a quick Google:
https://apjjf.org/-Michael-T--Klare/1589/article.pdf ). Are you sure you can't remember this period before the bellicosity?
My take is that a tit-for-tat PR strategy was deployed at some point. Not only has the mirroring in the language caught my eye on many occasions, but you can't really be blamed for doing something that Trump does on a daily basis. It might even be a well-known strategy in China now when engaged in confrontation with Westerners who take for granted their English language advantage (more self-entitlement). Whatever the case, no doubt Bush, Trump and similar nationalists were a PR godsend for Xi and his merry band, allowing him to play to a more extreme audience like Trump.
The switch to utilising (near) bilinguals with a comprehension of Western rhetoric in social media comms became obvious at one point. I don't have a date as it has all blurred together over time, but I remember noticing it at some point.
To be fair, China has always been more rhetorically muscular than, say, Korea and Japan, but it has never been overtly
puerile and
shameful like Trump and friends. Hence, my assumption is that it has taken up this approach as a controlled PR strategy. The US election frightens me on this front because the usual nutters will drive the conversation to the extreme right, forcing US moderates to join them in the loony bin, and by extension drive China's internal discussion to extreme right.
As I say, bellicose hyperbole that ratchets up war and conflict is the hidden crime that precedes the later destruction. And Trump has been allowed to spout rubbish unrestrained like a thoughtless mental case from day one, building on the rhetorical failures of the Bush neocons who poisoned the international waters before him.
People who care about the world and don't want an even bigger disaster than Iraq hung around their necks ought to be far more prudent than they're being. The cowardly avoidance of the insult 'appeaser', as if that's the only moral insight people have gleaned from history, is an extraordinarily poor and indeed pathetically ironic reason for starting Vietnams and Iraqs, or indeed a new Cold War.