I feel this is a burden of proof situation like one can always argue due to lack of transparency in CCP, they are secretly trying even tho there's little to no evidence as demonstrated in the article. What type of evidence is required to prove that China is NOT actively in an arms race? idk if it's even possible to do so? 

Psychologically, worry is negative prediction about future. They believe a healthy person would not worry about things that have extremely low probability, can't be predicted, can be predicted but there's nothing you can do about it. I'd say AI x-risk can be easily perceived to be at least one of them.