> China's advantage is always communicated as cheap labor but it's also the ability to almost infinitely scale production lines in a short period of time. America has mostly lost the muscle memory and tooling to do this.

...

>There are incentives that would benefit domestic producers and companies but those take time and don't make good soundbites for politicians.

I heard a very compelling argument (at least to me), that the difference, as you say, isn't the labor. The labor cost difference is something like 5% in the China vs 8% in the US. The difference is ramp up time. If you have a product ready to be built, you can get it to market much faster manufacturing in China than the US.

As an example, the Tesla Gigafactory in Nevada took about 2 years (June 2014-July 2015)[1]

Tesla Gigafactory in China took 168 days to construct (January 2019-October 2019)[1]

The cost of the factory construction, materials and labor, isn't the biggest loss when deciding where to build your factory. The biggest cost is the opportunity cost of not manufacturing your product for 15 months and the potential of losing any first to market advantage if you have competition.

The time to get your product to market, especially if you're a new company with no income operating on investor money, the time spent trying to manufacture in the US can sink your company. The cost difference is much more manageable and, depending of the product, can often times be overcome by the price of shipping.

[1] https://manufacturingdigital.com/digital-factory/timeline-te...