In a tariff game of who will blink first, President Donald Trump is posturing that his gaze will be the strongest.
"I have great respect for China, but they can't do this," President Trump said from the Oval Office earlier this month. "We're going to have one shot at this, and no other president's going to do this — what I'm doing."
The "this" he's referring to is hitting dozens of countries with new tariffs, but none more than China, with tariffs on products from the country now pushed to 145%.
The recent escalation shows the nation's complicated and robust trading history with the world's second-most-populous country.
"Hundreds of billions of dollars a year they make on us on trade, and it shouldn't be that way," President Trump said.
But how did we get here?
"It's a simple story, which is we're really good at making some stuff and China's really good at making some other stuff," said Justin Wolfers, a professor of public policy and economics at the University of Michigan. "The stuff they can make more efficiently, they produce cheaply, and we buy it."
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As of 2023, China was the cheapest source for 29% of products brought into the U.S., including product categories like footwear, metals, textiles, and electrical equipment.
According to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, the next closest countries were Canada at 10% and Mexico at 8%.
"We've got reliant on cheap product. That is exactly what happened in the United States," said business consultant and supply chain expert Kimberly Reuter.
She notes that America's reliance on China for cheaper labor and manufacturing dates back to the recession years of the 1970s.
"We have to remember that China has been at this for 60 years. They have been laser-focused on becoming the biggest manufacturer in the world," Reuter said.
As of last year, China-based sellers represented nearly half of the top 10,000 sellers on Amazon in the U.S., according to the e-commerce intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse.
The academic research paper "The China Shock," published in 2016, also outlines the surge, explaining that U.S. reliance on China has been a mixed bag.
Its authors show that manufacturing jobs declined by millions in the United States. But they also point to positive employment effects. For instance, some firms that were able to offshore production to China raised the productivity of their workers in the U.S. They also became capable of producing more goods.
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"It's really a two sides of the coin issue and both are true at the same time," said Liz Pancotti, a trade expert and managing director with the organization Groundwork Collaborative.
She said the sizable increase in Chinese imports hurt domestic manufacturing workers and communities but also lowered prices for many Americans.
"Especially for consumer goods like electronics, toys, and apparel," Pancotti said. "This has some benefits for lower-income households who spend a higher portion of their income on these goods."
Wolfers specifically points to toys as an example of how American families benefit from trade with China.
"My kids grow up with tons of toys because they're cheap," he said. "The economy of kids' toys is really a microcosm for understanding the broader economy. We have a lot more stuff. It's brightly colored. Sure, you can say it's made of plastic, but I'll tell you what — my kids are a lot happier today than they would be with my mother's old toys."
This all begs the question: Can President Trump's tariff strategy unwind U.S. dependence on China for cheaper goods?
"We don't have the infrastructure. We don't have access to the raw materials, and we don't have the skilled labor force to do it," Reuter said. "It's going to take us a minimum of three years for us to see any benefit from this."
On President Trump's "Liberation Day" on April 2, he claimed jobs and factories would come roaring back.
Before the launch of Trump's newest tariffs, data from the U.S. Census suggested that U.S. imports from China were already on a downward slide, falling from about 21% of U.S. imports in 2018 to roughly 13% last year.
With higher tariffs, shipping routes from China are expected to drop even more in the months ahead.
