How Trump's Tariffs Play Right Into China's Hands

After two trips to China in the past four months, I've been trying to say this every way I know how: folks, you just don't understand.

- THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

COVID had terrible effects on human health and mortality, but it also had a terrible effect on our ability to understand China. American and European business executives left China in droves at the start of the pandemic. Very, very few of them ever went back. They entrusted their China businesses to local managers. While they were gone, Beijing took a great leap forward in advanced manufacturing that the world missed. It has created a manufacturing engine the likes of which may never have been seen in history.

China controls one-third of all global manufacturing (up from six percent in 2000), and whether you are talking about cars or robots or phones, what is coming out of China today is not just cheaper and faster. It is cheaper, faster, better and smarter – and it is all about to be dramatically supercharged by China's headlong rush to put artificial intelligence into everything it makes.

This engine is the product of decades of massive government investments in education, infrastructure and research, behind walls of protection – in a society where people are ready to work from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week. While China was building that, America's biggest new industry was political polarization and getting its children addicted to TikTok and Instagram.