How Elon Musk and Taylor Swift Can Resolve U.S.-China Relations

I just spent a week in Beijing and Shanghai, meeting with Chinese officials, economists and entrepreneurs, and let me get right to the point: While we were sleeping China took a great leap forward in high-tech manufacturing of everything.

If no one has told Donald Trump, then I will: His nickname on Chinese social media today is “Chuan Jianguo” — meaning “Trump the (Chinese) Nation Builder” — because of how his relentless China bashing and tariffs during his first term as president lit a fire under Beijing to double down on its efforts to gain global supremacy in electric cars, robots and rare materials, and to become as independent of America’s markets and tools as possible.

“China had its Sputnik moment — his name was Donald Trump,” Jim McGregor, a business consultant who lived in China for 30 years, told me. “He woke them up to the fact that they needed an all-hands-on-deck effort to take their indigenous scientific, innovative and advanced manufacturing skills to a new level.”

The China that Trump will encounter is a much more formidable export engine. Its advanced manufacturing muscles have exploded in size, sophistication and quantity in the last eight years, even while consumption by its people remains puny.

If I were drawing a picture of China’s economy today as a person, it would have an awesome manufacturing upper body — like Popeye, still eating spinach — with consuming legs resembling thin little sticks.

China’s export machine is so strong now that only very high tariffs might really slow it down, and China’s response to very high tariffs could be to start cutting off American industries from crucial supplies that are now available almost nowhere else. That kind of supply-chain warfare is not what anyone, anywhere needs.