If not caused by politics, then by demographic crash.
Can't really be shocked when nation states enact laws to protect industries + workers.
To compare, 2024 (UN) fertility rates (highest-lowest):[1]
US: 1.62
Japan: 1.23
China: 1.02
ROC: 0.86
ROK: 0.75 (where an increase to 0.8 in 2025 was cause for celebration, as is a predicted increase to 0.85 by mid 2026)[2]
US: +10%
Japan: -16%
China: -8%
ROC: -6%
ROK: -12%
[2] https://www.chosun.com/english/national-en/2026/01/24/IVHGRT...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_past_and_...
China's one big advantage over other work forces is massive amounts of labor that can be directed by central planning. As their labor costs have gone up, labor intensive manufacturing has already started shifting away. When population declines cause labor costs to go even higher, they lose their advantage.
China threatened to pull rare earths from the menu which is how they beat Trump in the trade war, among other things which were not going to be sustainable aka farm stuff.
They want to take Taiwan eventually and that will cause potential confrontation.
So the key to China is that it just can't be a lynchpin for anything.
Major trading partner - yes.
Key partner for anything - no.
The US is already a material player in Chips, outside of Trump's 'knee jerk' and reactionary instinct based on 1980's geopolitics and stupid understanding of trade (aka 'importing = getting ripped off', or 'other people doing similar things = stealing from us') ... it does make sense to have material domestic capabilities.
The only place that can be more or less trusted to not play hard shenanigans is Europe. They will do their own regulatory things, and play rough with exports, but they would not threaten something hard.
Europe has underplayed the value of ASML etc..
China has also flipped from 'Quiet and Bide Time' to the opposite, and are not a nice geoplitical actor in their direct environs like S. China sea, although are relatively 'neutral' on most other things.
Best thing is to a) have 'reliable domestic capability' b) learn to build stuff, if not labour intensive ways c) don't depend on sketchy places for key things d) moslty carrots, have a big stick when needed.
China will never 'play fair' in terms of what we would consider 'fair' - they have their own views of everything - that's fine - but it just means has to be manaaged.
Also China should not have any access to data or popular social media / entertainment etc. TikTok must be locally managed, and strong data sovereignty rules also apply.
More of a 'good fences make good neighbours' think with them.
See former Aussie PM Rudd on 'Strategic Guardrails' - he has a good understanding.
This changed under Xi Jinping and no one knows what the effects will be.
> inevitable decline or elimination of China as a production and/or trading partner
I don't think this will happen anytime soon, that companies will need short-term planning.
Granted, I don't think continuing to shift to places with slave wages is a good thing overall, but we need complete factory automation to solve that problem (the problem of wanting cheap goods AND ethical labor). But the major players have seen the writing on the wall ever since covid lockdowns and have been slowly moving out of China since.
https://www.piie.com/research/piie-charts/2024/chinas-popula...
Massive immigration (on a scale never seen in human history) would be required. I don't see that happening with one of the most xenophobic cultures on Earth.
This isn't a problem confined to China, they just have the worst numbers. The entire "first world" is facing declines of varying degrees.
This coupled with climate change is why immigration policy is probably the single most important thing for most countries right now.
It's a reason they began to be called nation-states - states without a nation backing it tended to flop, and nation's without a state tended to slowly (or quickly) be absorbed into the dominant culture.
There are roughly five working-age adults to support every retiree today. This is going to crater. United Nations projections show that by 2050, that ratio will more than double, climbing past 50%. At that point, China will have fewer than two working-age adults for every retiree. The west grew rich before growing old. China, Vietnam, Brazil are aging as middle income countries.
The one child policy was like doing speed, it temporarily freed up massive amounts of capital and labor. But China's work force peaked over a decade ago. The bill is now due, and all the those "single children" know that they are expected to support 2 parents and 4 grandparents.
Aside from the dubious wisdom of similar interventions, cruelly forcing abortions was a lot easier policy to enforce then it would be to try to shove pro-natalist policies on people increasingly overburdened with caregiving for elders because of earlier interventions.
I don't think they're foolish enough to invite the entire third world into the country to bolster low birth rates like the west does. So that leaves doing it the old fashioned way, which is a slow ship to turn around.
Outlawing or taxing imports (=tarriffs) of course helps with this.
However, if you look at economic history this always slowly lead to problems that only got resolved by fresh loans (that's what the move to dollar effectively did), hyperinflation or wars.
Wiki says: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_in_China
> In the book, McGee says that, under the leadership of Tim Cook, Apple invested $275 billion in China between 2016 and 2021, to manufacture its products in the country (including building factories and supply chains in China, as well as training Chinese workers). McGee compares this to the Marshall Plan, as this is in excess of other corporate spending and, in real terms, was about twice the monetary value of the Marshall Plan.
People in favour of tariffs make it seem like the best and wealthiest economy in the world is in a bad shape, and it is completely opposite, while failing to address the inequality issue with the wealth distribution.
It also increases the immiseration of those in the areas replaced[3], which is likely a contributor to rising populism and political instability. Most of this malaise is just hidden in places like the Rust Belt.
[1]https://www.csis.org/analysis/rare-earth-export-restrictions...
If the type of prosperity you want to point to is "stock market go up," we need to talk about who owns the stocks and who doesn't.
We used to actually have starving people in this country, now we talk about "food insecurity".
Would you prefer to go back to a time were people were literally starving?
Because that's the difference between China and the US. It's not that the US does nothing, just that China does way more. Some companies are apparently paying negative tax (meaning every products sold the state adds 15% to the price, such deals apparently exist)
But, yeah, less tax means less everything for everyone. Especially less social support and less healthcare. But I guess this is what some of the more constructive people mean when they say taxes are too high. As well as what socialists meant 30 years ago when they said that very high import tariffs are a necessity. They compensate for these huge differences. But at the cost of making any foreign product (ie. "your iPhone") a lot more expensive than it already is.
Apple invested 3x that because they got 30x in return from the savings versus US manufacturing.
>Imagine if they'd spent that on the US instead.
Then iPhones would either have to be 10x more exsolve to keep the same profit margins or Apple would be broke trying to compete with Chinese made goods using US manufacturing.
However, it seems that Americans are so tired of growing prices that they are getting used to paying them. Just yesterday there was an article that summarized oil price drop 40% from when the war cooled down, but prize at the pump went down only 12%. The big oil explains this that people will buy gas anyways, so why lowering the price? I think we will see the same happening with electronics - Apple breaking news on $500B factory spending in USA is mostly because they believe Apple owners will keep buying Apple regardless of the price. They may be right... will see.
> I still get iPhone and Lenovo laptops 40% cheaper than family members living in Europe.
Because the gas station across the street will sell it for less. Because a different refinery will sell it to the gas station for less. Gas prices are the pump and oil prices in the commodities market don’t move in perfect unison. But they do move eventually.
Wild how some ragebait “article” can erase people’s memory of gas prices going down. Not to mention that gas at the pump has taxes/labor applied to it that can also change.
https://www.macrotrends.net/2501/crude-oil-vs-gasoline-price...
Indeed, but the role of a government is to steer/push private initiative in a certain direction.
Tariffs and stuff are steering private companies towards building stuff in-house (as in: "in the us").
Future initiative inconsistent with this directions will essentially be a sabotage of the US economy.
The fact that a president can create them out of thin air means they can be removed just as easily. I'm not anti-tariff or anti-re-homing-production (where it makes sense) but the _way_ it was done is my problem. Additionally there was no ramp, it was 0->100 immediately. A bill passed by congress to slowly ratchet up tariffs or similar over a period of time would have a much larger impact IMHO. It would give companies the ability to plan instead of just react. The tariffs were enacted in a timespan that made it impossible to move production local before they went into effect. Additionally, tariffs being applied unequally is terrible, it just means whoever has the biggest bribes (solid gold plaque holders anyone?) or can pretend they are moving manufacturing back to the US gets an advantage.
The amount of power held in the executive branch is unacceptable. Just look at how they raided/repurposed the CHIPS act money to force Intel (which I have no real love for) to sell a stake to the government.
Authoritarian governments are bad for business.
Some of them were removed. And then put back. Then increased, then decreased, or otherwise changed depending on what Trump was thinking at 3am while making social media posts
If tariffs were planned, steady increase on a long term we might see a good effect. Like tariffs were used before this trump admin.