This seems unlikely. Only 18% of our imports come from China. In fact, 14% of our imports come from Mexico and 14% from Canada. Given that China has 11.1x the population of Mexico and 39x the population of Canada, we don't actually get that much from China.
It would certainly hurt. I remember the early days of the pandemic when I had to wait 45 days for my new laptop. However, I don't need a laptop to survive. I need food and shelter.
> all they have to do is turn off exports for a month and we'd be killing each other over the last item in stock anywhere that is now 100 times the price because of no availability
What items would we be fighting over? iPhones? Because I need to eat at least one iPhone a week as part of a balanced diet? We love our phones and other consumer goods and we've certainly seen how interconnected our supply chains are, but the idea that we'd fall into murderous anarchy seems incredibly unlikely.
Let's look at what we import from China: computers ($151B), apparel ($56B), electrical equipment ($36B), misc. manufacturing ($35B), furniture ($18B), machinery ($20B), fabricated metals ($18B), and plastics ($16B). We're actually an exporter in both the food and agriculture categories to China. Yes, some of those are economically important fields, but the idea that I'd be stabbing you over a sweater or laptop within a month is nuts. "I don't care who I have to kill to get my JCrew!"
Yea, China is an important trading partner and it would certainly hurt if China shut off trade. I'm not arguing it wouldn't hurt. At the same time, China is 17-18% of our imports.
And the thing is that it would hurt for China too. Right now, China is appeasing its citizens with an export-driven economy. Imagine the massive unemployment rates if China cut off exports to the US. People who are presently happy or at least neutral toward the regime might end up being really angry.
Plus, the second China cuts off the US, it kinda has to go the (figurative) nuclear route and cut off the whole world. EU leaders aren't going to sit around saying "Wow, it sucks to be an American. I'm glad nothing like that can happen to us!" No, they're going to immediately start moving their economy away from reliance on China in preparation to cut off China. If it happens to America, it'll happen to Europe as well. Even if EU leaders were like, "nah, China would never do that to us," the US would apply a ton of pressure - and EU leaders aren't that stupid.
It's pretty clear that cutting off exports to the US in that manner would bifurcate the world Cold War style. It seems clear that Aus/NZ/EU/UK/Japan/SK/Israel/Canda/Mexico would end up with the US. The US currently has free trade agreements with all of Central America, Colombia, and Peru so I'd guess they'd be with the US and cutting off China. Brazil and Argentina are major non-NATO allies. India would love the opportunity presented by most of the world cutting off China. Apple is already moving manufacturing to India and the Indian government wants the kind of economic growth that China has seen.
It would certainly hurt if China cut off exports to the US. We're not prepared for it. However, it would leave China a lot worse off than us.
> Imagine an alternate universe where the US built up Mexico and 99% of everything was made there instead of China
I do agree US foreign policy toward Mexico hasn't always been great, but we actually have built up a lot of industry in Mexico. As I noted, we import nearly as much from Mexico as we do from China despite China having 11x the population.
And China is going to be declining over the next 50 years. Their population is projected to decline from 1.4B to 700M-1B by 2100 (depending on what estimate you look at) and they're going to have a lot of old people compared to working-age people. Their workforce is already down 2.5% from its 2015 peak. The US, on the other hand, will still be a growing nation thanks to immigration.
I get that it seems like "everything comes from China", but that really isn't the truth. China is a very important trading partner. However, cutting off trade isn't going to bring anarchy to the US. It will make every country reliant on trade with China start working toward isolating China. China would need to start invading its neighbors to build up an isolated trading block against the juggernaut that would likely be the US, EU, India, Canada, Mexico, and so many other countries who would start treating China like the Soviet Union.
"If you come at the king, you best not miss." This would certainly be a miss. It would hurt for sure. In the long run, China would face a world where they were no longer a welcome trading partner, where they'd lost their advantages as the rest of the world recreated what China once offered, and where they'd face huge domestic unrest from such a major economic upheaval.
We're at one of the lowest points of American influence since World War II. That's not even a criticism of the state of politics in the US. It's simply a realistic view of the fact that Europe, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, etc. don't need the US nearly as much as they did when US money was rebuilding Europe or when the US was the bulwark against the Soviet Union. If China cut off trade to the US, they'd catapult the US back into that position of de-facto leadership. Maybe the US would share that position a little with the EU this time around, but we would see a world where countries looked toward the US for their future leaving China really isolated. China doesn't want to hand leadership of the world back to the US. They want to make China look like a reasonable trading partner that countries should look toward so that they can hold some of the leadership.