I don’t think you quite understand whats going on here so let me explain it to you.
First China is our competitor not our trading partner. They need us far more than we need them.
Demographics are not in China’s favor. Due to decades of a one child policy they have an aging population. Unlike the US China got old before they got rich.
The only reason that China has been able to compete with us is years of us allowing them to manipulate their currency, steal our intellectual property and put tariffs on our exports to them. This has culminated in allowing a country that is basically our enemy to enrich itself and engage in military expansion which is dangerous to its neighbors and the concept of open seas.
Trump is doing to China what Reagan did to Russia. He is forcing them to go head to head with the US economy which no country in the world can do without imploding. The sooner we get this over with the better.
I have no problem with playing hardball with China in order to protect IP rights. I have a problem with people complaining about the giant sucking sound of blue collar manufacturing jobs going to foreign countries. I am not a fan of protecting special interests. I equate the mentality of those people trying to protect blue collar manufacturing jobs with high school kids throwing a protest over climate change.
I often see this idea repeated on FR, but it needs clarification and debunking. China's rural areas are aging. China's rural areas have a big shortage of females. China's rural areas are still poor, no matter how old they are. That's a billion people...but a billion people who still live very simply and whose social concerns have no particular effect on the trade war debate.
China's cities, on the other hand, populated with a middle class of over 400 million, are very young, very heavily populated with females, and very, very rich. Walk around the central business district of one of these cities some time - you'll see vast numbers of young women and almost nobody over 40. They have far, far more intelligent young people doing professional/office work than we do.
Come to the USA where 70-year-olds are working at McDonalds because they need the money (shocking and unheard of in China) and you will see the real aging nation. Our white majority's birthrate is far too low - which is one of the reasons the GOPe is so busy trying to import the next generation of Social Security payers.
I agree 100% with Trump drawing the line at this point - especially over the intellectual property issues - but China doesn't need us that much. Thanks to the Clintons and the RINOs, they have already had all the industrial and technological base they need for quite a long time. They have huge markets for their products in Europe and all over Asia. At most, a reduction of exports to the US at this time will be an inconvenience to them, and add to a number of pre-existing economic problems they are dealing with. Xi Jinping certainly isn't happy that someone finally stood up to China, but he isn't panicking, either.