China Isn’t Taking Over Manufacturing, It’s Taking Over Retail
23rd May 2025
American officials usually accuse China of trying to take over our manufacturing, but that’s old news. China took over our manufacturing long ago. And the parts it still hasn’t taken over are usually the parts that it doesn’t want or that are too uneconomical to be worth taking over.
Taking over America’s manufacturing was never China’s endgame. Taking over our economy is.
Undercutting, stealing and dumping its way to manufacturing supremacy was how China got its foot in our door. Americans came to think of China as an assembly line for cheap junk, but the cheap junk built China’s production capacity. The next step was moving up to components for bigger products and then the products themselves. Once the components were being made in China, it made more sense for the companies to simplify by moving everything to China.