Some days I think this, other days not. There’s an old expression “box a wrestler, and wrestle a boxer”. Basically don’t compete on their strengths if you can avoid it. Better to fight a shark on land than to start taking swimming lessons:-)
The thing is- as huge as America's manufacturing gap with Mainland China is, the creativity gap is equally large. That’s a result of our much maligned Western educational system.
Art class in Mainland China is the teacher draws a bird on the board, all the students copy that bird. I'm not passing judgement on that- it's just a different system. When I was a kid in New York Public School- the teacher said “draw a bird” and we had birds in the park, Godzilla size birds destroying the city, robot birds- no two were alike. In China it's very much a color-inside-the-lines affair. There is a little movement here, but it’s very slow and only with very well educated Chinese parents who see the advantage: http://www.dddyin.com/portal.php?mod=view&aid=2580
Before a project with the scale and ambition of bringing back American manufacturing was launched, I’d like to see how this existing high value attribute could better be monetize and scaled. It will take a long time before we can ever hope to make things as well as the Chinese now do- but we can design better things now. The problem is profiting from that without stifling domestic innovation.