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They said "hard decoupling with China, no way, never happen, Americans buy too much stuff, are too big on treats, would never be allowed". And yet... here we are.
Once it's done Chinese factories will close. It won't happen in a week or a month, but within 3-6 months they're going to close factories because the demand just vanishes, unless the government of China starts handing out checks to keep the lights on this will have impacts on China. They can't just route all this stuff to the EU or Africa or whatever, the US is a huge, huge market with specific specifications for power supply and connectors and safety stuff and so on so things would need to be retooled but even after that that's a bunch of demand that's just gone for a while and Trump and co seem to be betting the US can hold out longer than China.
More interestingly for me someone stuck in the US it'll have impacts in the US. In that while companies don't want to move their production from China because it costs money, if they are already bleeding money from lost/no-sales they have little choice. They'll move it to Vietnam, to India, to Mexico, wherever at great expense and the prices will never return to the pre-tariff levels but they'll have production and some people will be able to afford some amount of it. The economy will implode but that doesn't particularly matter because it's just another chance for the capitalists to profit and buy up all the pieces at rock bottom prices while absolutely fucking cost of living, destroying the hopes most people to have any kind of quality of life, etc but that's fine they think the proles have it too good anyways and need disciplining.
I always thought that they'd use Taiwan like Ukraine as a pretext to force decoupling but now maybe they figure they can just make Trump do this, assign all the blame to him while he and a subset of the tech companies hold down wall street and force it to do this "for its own good". It's an interesting kind of disciplining of international finance capital by another segment of the bourgeoisie and by empire planners. If it all goes well they achieve their wants, if it all blows up then they blame it on Trump.
There was a post here recently about Chinese economics. The value of Chinese exports as a percentage of Chinese GDP is quite low compared to the majority of countries in the world. There will be an adjustment for sure, but it's not going to send the Chinese into catastrophe
Sorry but you're way off base. China's exports to the US only account for ~3% of their GDP.
USA could halt all Chinese imports overnight and China would barely notice.
I feel that number has to be telling less than the full story using some clever calculation. I get they have a policy of domestic consumption but you can only do so much of that. More than that I think the GDP number you cite doesn't really reveal how many jobs would be lost which is an actual problem. You can't just take a hit of your sales halving to a big market like the US and keep all the factories open, some are just going to close entirely and others will eliminate shifts. Because that's what we'll see if 50% tariff rates stick or even worse get up to 80% or higher from Trump retaliating on China's retaliation.
China can probably take if far better than the US but I have to wonder if the US even cares. If at this point we're not at a take the toys and build a high fence around the yard and go home and this is less about hurting China as opposed to autarky at home and setting that up and attempting to transition from capitalism to some sort of barbarism with the belief that robotics and AI will make enough proles redundant that the bourgeoisie or a group of them can just rule as aristocracy over the result. It won't work in the long-run but they'll kill an awful large amount of us before they ever realize that. And that worries me more than China surviving the US attempting to beat on it economically using this.
You're missing one very crucial part of this equation: BRICS. China has been spending the last 20 years cultivating these relationships.
BRICS is currently a more powerful, more influential, and more wealthy trading bloc than the G7. IIRC BRICS is about 35% of global GDP, and G7 is 25%.
If the US stops buying Chinese products they can simply sell them somewhere else.
They can definitely sell them elsewhere, and if companies threaten to abandon ship, while I am just hypothesizing here, China likely has a legal way to seize the factories to prevent the loss of productive capacity.
It will definitely have an effect on China, but they’ve been working on decoupling for years already. That’s exactly what BRICS and Belt and Road are facilitating. BYD is the largest EV brand in the world despite not selling in the US, Huawei still one of the biggest phone brands despite being banned. It’ll slow things down there, but it’s hardly an existential crisis.