Of course, which is why it isn't as simple as just "make more jobs lol." China played the long game and came out on top, not just with steel and electronics but pharmaceuticals as well, as we're now painfully aware. The rest of the world sat back and just let it happen, let China manipulate their currency and flood the markets with cheap crap that forced tons of industrial capacity to collapse. And if any single country decided to try and restart a collapsed industry, China would muscle them out again.
It would be no less painful to extricate ourselves from Chinese hegemony, and probably more so. I don't think the US could go it alone in this case; so long as any country continues to let China rip them off, they'll keep doing it. And let's not forget Belt and Road effectively enslaving multiple nations through massive debt. It feels to me like it would take the combined forces of pretty much every other country on the planet to get them to play fair, but that would be one hell of a difficult task to pull off. It'll only get harder the longer we wait, though.
What would happen if China's economy collapses, though? We all know the ChiComs lie about basically everything, so they're very likely lying about the state of their economy. Would a Chinese collapse make it easier to break free from their control, or would our interconnected economies bring us down with them?
