The total shock and awe overwhelming numbers of Desert Storm is not a true comparison. You’ll have to remember also the incredible shellacking highlighted by Swarzkopt’s daily bomb damage reports the month leading up to the invasion.
The only thing the Chinese really need to worry about America, other than the economic strangle hold they have on us, is our presence in the South and East China Seas. They certainly have the ability, locally, to enforce a blockade of Taiwan. They can certainly sink a US carrier off the coast of Taiwan that was attempting to break the blockade. It would be up to whoever or whatever in DC making these decisions to decide if that action would be the start of WWIII. A sane president wouldn’t. No sanity in DC lately.
“other than the economic strangle hold they have on us”
Yeah, that’s a myth. China is just as dependent on imports from the West as we are on exports from China. In fact, I think we’d fare much better in the event of a wartime trade stoppage than they would, since we can source the stuff they provide us from a number of alternatives, whereas if they lose our imports, they can’t replace them and they depend on those imports to run their manufacturing, so they would also have no more exports to sell to anyone else.