Maybe we could have a comprehensive tariff on goods that floats with the number of state-sponsored cyber crimes, human rights violations, etc. Hack our routers? The rate just went up 5%.
better to block their goods form the market if they refuse to allow others to compete in theirs
cant sell your goods or software in china without local business taking cuts and trade secrets? well bad luck now you cant do business in the west either until you drop that shit
China has the infrastructure to produce, the population to produce it, and the government to build more. I don't think there's really anybody that can compete with that.
People underestimate how much production other countries are capable of. Of course, China does dominate the manufacturing game, especially mass production.
There's no shortage of alternatives all the same. Vietnam in particular has been doing quite well taking manufacturing work that companies are moving out of China so as to diversify their production chain. India is rising on that front too. Not to mention that the west truly does far more manufacturing than people give credit for — I've found that nearly every category of general goods that I try to buy will have some US made options. That's not even touching the rest of the west. The big exception being electronics, but those have Vietnam and India as growing alternatives, with Taiwan, Japan, Malaysia, and Singapore all as solid players in that market.
The overall point being: it's entirely possible to remove China from the manufacturing chain if there's enough money behind the push. The US economy is probably large enough to do so with some meaningful struggle. The US and major allies could do so more easily. The difficulty is more political and temporal. Getting everyone on board and committed plus going through with the multi-year long process.
I think that the most disappointing aspect of obama's presidency was that he did not do anything about china imposing those bullshit rules. he should have imposed some balance or outright make it illegal for those companies to put themselves in a situation where their ip's will be sucked dry.