Western MBAs and politicians think they know that manufacturing is just a fungible commodity and think that we're exploiting cheap Chinese labor to 'drive shareholder value'.
While they have this myopic focus on quarterly results, the CCP has a 100- and 500-year plan, and is happily exploiting that myopia for strategic economic and military value, including subsidizing massive undercutting of entire industries in order to kill all but their own. The result is that they are gaining the deep know-how of manufacturing, the ability to compromise their adversaries' military gear at the component level, and the ability to choke off supply chains.
Although there is still barely time to repair this, it will go down as a strategic blunder of historic proportions.
Western manufacturers are constantly pulling their factories back from China, many having gained an ultimate net loss from moving in in the 90s and now relocating again.
And sure Chinese labor isn't as cheap, they've moved up the value chain some, but it is still cheap enough compared to US wages to make items and ship them here - particularly with China's lax environmental and labor laws.
The relocations to even cheaper labor-rate counties are still an improvement, as at least they aren't creating all levels of strategic disadvantage...
Which is just a business buzzphrase for "Greed."
The West is being eaten alive by its own greed, and the Chinese are just watching us do it.
This is the biggest weakness of the West - and it all stems back to "share holder value".
Companies, US ones, in particular, seem to have some absurd drive to pay endless dividends to shareholders, and drive 'value' via share price, by appearing to be profitable.
In other words, get stuff from the cheapest provider.
It didn't help that at the same time people like Carl Icahn came along and stripped a company that was cheap to buy, but also sat on a pile of cash. And again, if he could 'drive value' for the share holders, said company was a target.
Eventually state-level politics appear - artificially low-prices Chinese goods because the CCP fix the exchange rate, or subsidise an entire market to corner it globally.
Rinse repeat, and that's where we're at now.