[DiogenesKynikos]

> The problem starts when there is a massive asymmetry in the trade.

Up until a few years ago, there was a massive asymmetry, but in the opposite sense to the asymmetry that Americans usually complain about. Because China was a developing country with very little capital but a huge labor pool, there were huge investment inflows into China. Western companies took advantage of cheap labor in China, setting up factories to produce for Western consumers. Chinese consumers were almost completely out of the picture. China did not have the capital to invest in foreign countries, so the investment was almost entirely unidirectional.

That began to change as China's workers began to earn more, and Western companies jumped into the Chinese consumer market (Starbucks has thousands of locations in China, VW sells millions of cars in China a year, and so on for countless Western companies). Whereas you would see almost no Chinese brands in Western consumer markets, the Chinese market was awash with Western brands.

Now, Chinese brands are starting to enter Western markets, and China also has capital to invest abroad. The relationship is becoming more bidirectional. To the United States, which was happy to exploit cheap Chinese labor and to sell airplanes to the Chinese market, the idea that China might be transforming into a serious economic and political competitor is alarming. That's why there are suddenly these myopic complaints about the relationship being one-sided.

> China has completely blocked US services from Google to Uber

Google is blocked in China for political reasons. Uber was allowed, and indeed operated in the Chinese market for a number of years. It failed there, because there was strong competition from companies that understood the local market and local consumer preferences better. Let me ask a simple question to test if the relationship really is asymmetric, and in which direction the asymmetry points: Do Chinese brands have a larger presence in the US than American brands have in China?

[fermienrico]

You've made some good points but what about the fact that everything in my living room, I mean everything from the paint on the wall to the keys on my Macbook - everything is made in China. I say that influence is of material value (goods) whereas Starbucks entering the Chinese market seems like a distraction.

[DiogenesKynikos]

That fact is due to exactly what I stated before: for decades, China had no capital and no consumer class, so all it could do was serve as a manufacturing platform for foreign companies.

I find it pretty difficult to blame China for this "asymmetry in trade," when that asymmetry was exactly what foreign governments wanted. They wanted China to open up its labor market, so that foreign companies could exploit cheap labor in China. The consumer market in China was tiny, whereas the American and European consumer markets were huge, so the relationship could not be symmetric.

Now, China's consumer market is actually quite large, and foreign companies play a huge role in that market. I didn't just mention Starbucks. I also mentioned VW, but I could equally have mentioned Boeing, Apple, Intel, Qualcomm or Micron. You'll notice a trend here: the US exports high-value-added products to China (including IP licenses and services). Most of what you have in your living room that's actually manufactured in China is lower on the value chain.

Over time, in other words, the US trade relationship with China is becoming more symmetric. Huawei's development into high-value-added products is a sign of that. It's actually this symmetry that the United States wants to avoid, because it means China becoming a peer-level competitor.

The US trade relationship with China will never become fully symmetric, though, because the US runs a net trade deficit with the rest of the world, for reasons that appear to me to have to do with the United States' unique financial position in the world.