Hardly. Mutually Assured Damage, with the US clearly coming out on top. There are plenty of other places to make cheap goods, even disregarding increasing automation. There are not as many places to sell cheap goods by the trillions.

In Africa we have started to speak of China as the modern age colonizers. They are appearing everywhere, building roads, airports, dams and coal fired power stations. They bring all their equipment. We have challenges with governance (understatement). In my home country we have severe power shortages, daily power cuts lasting up 18 hours. Chinese are building a power station. So picture the day we try assert some right and China just switches off the power. This kind of scenario is playing itself out in Africa and I fear by the time we wake up China will own the continent. I exaggerate but I think you get my point.

s/we have/some of us, actually just a small minority on Twitter, have/

Twitter doesn't build power stations. Its pretty hard to miss the ground being cleared as the power station is being built.

Where I live, Hitachi build the power stations. So we all now also believe the Japanese are colonising Africa?

Outside of Twitter 'building complex machines for a fee != colonisation'.

You missed the part where I said in Africa we have governance challenges. 99 year lease of Sri Lanka Hambantota port is modern day colonization.

> Don't sign up to loans you cannot afford.

And that's the problem - the Chinese are offering them and people/countries are taking them, in large numbers. That statement also applies to home loans, yet the 2008 crisis. A nice platitude isn't going to prevent people from falling into China's lap.

I wouldn't underestimate the quality of the supply chains in China. They've had decades of development and experience, and starting elsewhere could not be done without significant setbacks.

Oh certainly. That’s what I meant by mutually assured damage. It wouldn’t be painless for either side. But I’d make the argument that it’s far more harmful to China.

The US was in a much better position when they ceased to be the industrial center of the world. Then again, we’ve never seen a nation like China.

China's a great place to make something cheap that doesn't last very long.

It's not a great place to make something that needs to last.

It's an even worse place to make something that needs to meet quality standards, since you spend as much or more on QA than you saved by moving manufacturing to China.

China makes things as good or bad as the client wants. My 12 yr old laptop was made in China.

In the long term, it isn't even necessarily damage. Chinese manufacturing won't be cheap forever; wages are already too high there for them to continue sorting through and recycling the US's plastic. Rebooting US manufacturing earlier rather than later will make the transition to "expensive China" less of a jolt.

Moving manufacturing out of China is not synonymous with moving manufacturing into the US. A great deal of that manufacturing would move to other countries with cheap labor and burgeoning supply chains.

If I was a Chinese strategist, I would announce a root and branch re-certification of the 737-MAX (in Chinese of course) as a completely new type.

Especially have just buttered up Airbus with 300 A320 orders in March. And even more so if I was convinced the C919 will certify in 2021.

There also aren't many places to sell aircraft by the hundreds.

Some low-end production had already been moving to places like Vietnam, based on labor costs where Chinese labor costs are now > places like Vietnam (and have been for a while). Trump's trade war has accelerated the trend.

Arguing the other way is that you have suppliers for, say in electronics, literally everything in places like Guangdong. So that's a disincentive to move.