Not really. EDS has never made a single computer, and yet they seem to be doing okay.
We are back to such large scale demographic transformations as happened early in the 20th century when people moved off the farm into other occupations, only now it is out of manufacturing into ??
...services. And it's already a done deal - 80% of this country's GDP came from the service sector last year.
Yet we only recently became a net importer of food in our country's history!
Actually, it'll be close to net zero, imports versus exports. Staples are still major exports, but we import lots of exotica from other places - wine, cheese, ethnic foodstuffs, et cetera. It's not such a bad deal.
Is the current account balance telling us anything?
Foreigners want to sell us things, and we want to buy them? Or were you looking for something deeper? ;)
Worse case scenario: At the end of the day it would seem China ends up with a huge amount of dollar bills (treasury notes) and excess capacity, and we end up with a lot of consumer goods and excess debt. To spend those dollars the Chinese would then turn to buying American productive capacity (farmland, R&D research, manufacturing capability, other American companies) while directing their excess capacity to new found internal demand. We are left in debt and without owning our productive capacity - a colony. Hopefully I'm missing something here so there is a happy ending.