Making China collapse is different from collapsing Japan and Germany. Even Russia is not that easy to take down as can be seen happening before our eyes. The collapse of China had been gloated more than twenty years ago and is now being renewed on a year-to-year basis. China will still be standing and be around while Gordon Chang may never live to see its collapse.
China has been blessed with two advantages, a big domestic market that others covet and a manufacturing hub that others cannot replicate. Japan and Germany may be manufacturing hubs in their respective high point, but do not have domestic market to leverage on, relying on the USA to their detriment. Therefore, taking down China is no piece of cake, not when the USA depends on 80% of its consumer products from China. Without Chinese manufacturing, Apple, Walmart and Amazon among others would not be what they are today. Even big names in high end goods have to be sourced from China.
Going back to basics of attracting manufacturing back to the USA with coercion, subsidies and threat is not going to work and easier said than done. Costs alone is not going to make such manufacturing successful and the lack of a big market like China is detrimental. Who wants to set up factories to suffer losses just selling in the USA alone. Investors go for the money making, not the hype. Subsidies can only go so far, and when you move into building factories in the USA, those subsidies are not going to be forever. Once the fish bites the bait, it is caught with no way out.
Anonymous
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The USA had over the decades been trying to collapse Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Venezuela and now Russia to no avail. Trying to collapse China may instead lead to the collapse of the USA itself.
Those tariffs may work if the USA had the manufacturing bases that needed protection, which tariffs are expected to do. But manufacturing in the USA is still far off and just an Indian pipe dream. Who is going to provide the alternative to China to stuff the shelves of Walmart and the warehouses of Amazon?
They want China to foot the tariff increases and trying their luck. Sure, the Chinese can just increase the prices of their products to cover those tariffs, which will still be far cheaper than what could be imported from the EU, UK, Canada, Japan and anywhere else on earth. Who will still have to foot the bill and bear the pain? Not the Chinese manufacturers by a long shot, who may export less to the USA, but more to the Global South. In fact, that is now happening.
At the end of the day, the tariffs will hurt USA consumers by hook or by crook, whether Chinese manufacturers absorb those tariffs or not, which they will not do by logic. Who gets trapped is still not certain.
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