Trade agreements don't need to be symmetric to be beneficial for both parties. Even if China didn't buy a single American good, it is beneficial for US to sell to china.

Export is what you pay for import. If China sells goods to US they will get dollars in return. These dollars are worthless except for buying American goods.

Even if China can't buy American goods, they can buy some other country's goods using their newly acquired dollars. Eventually someone somewhere will use those dollars to buy American goods.

Sure, the USD is the world's reserve currency. And, while it's also the currency of the international trade, the US's share of China's import isn't as significant -- in 2019, China imported over $2T, or $2,000B, worth of goods and services globally and, of that, only $163B, came from the US. In fact, the US is not even the biggest import nation, it's South Korea, followed by Japan and Taiwan.

Those dollars aren't necessarily used to purchase American goods but rather to acquire ownership stakes in American assets.

This is one of the best HN comments I've read on the China issue. Finally a fair comment.

Cheers.

This topic actually really depresses me. The whole "crisis" is unnecessary. The US and China can easily, and probably should renegotiate trade terms amicably. It just seems to be politically impossible to say "we got what we wanted then, but now we have different priorities." It doesn't seem possible to actually spell out priorities, or admit that in a negotiation, the other party has priorities too.

Geopolitics, or humans rights issues are a different matter. There are real dangers at play, now that the two countries are equal rivals. China's way of disciplining companies (eg Nike when they made a Xinjiang, or John Cena's little speech) is directly at odds with the US' MO. It's quite zero sum. I don't see how that gets resolved, in a way that doesn't (for example) have the potential knock a whole $trn off Apple's market cap.