China is currently in a growth trap where expectations that growth will continue drive investment and growth, but once businesses conclude growth won't be robust, they reduce investment, which then causes growth to slow further, creating a self-reinforcing negative cycle that is difficult to escape.

The United States uniquely thinks it is possible and desirable to be close to self-sufficient in trade, unlike other developed economies which know their standard of living depends on sustained enormous trade with one another; the US debate on trade is fundamentally different from the rest of the world because of America's unique ability to theoretically approach self-sufficiency.

China's growth rate of close to 10 percent per year that was sustained until about 2012 was never going to be sustained indefinitely because export growth could not be sustained at that rate (China became too big and saturated markets) and infrastructure had already become overdeveloped, forcing China to seek new growth drivers.

The rise of China and Asia has created a new set of competitors and displaced established industries in developed countries, becoming a major political factor in countries like the US and Europe, and creating concerns about de-industrialization in developing countries that previously made progress.

The Western world, particularly the US, remains absolutely dominant in the global financial system through control of the dollar as the world's most important currency, dominance of capital markets particularly in New York and London, and continued technological leadership, even though these advantages are being challenged more than in the past.

China pursued the largest real estate boom or bubble in world history to maintain growth after export-driven and infrastructure-investment models were exhausted, leading to massive debt accumulation similar to Western economies before the 2008 financial crisis.

Xi Jinping's anti-corruption crackdown necessarily slows the dynamism of China's capitalist system because corruption is structurally part of the system; cracking down on corruption is effectively cracking down on the market economy, causing capitalists to become frightened, entrepreneurs to leave or reduce risk-taking, bureaucrats to become more cautious, and underlying growth dynamics to slow.

The economic benefits of focusing on revitalization of manufacturing in a very highly advanced, high-wage economy like the United States is something about which one must be somewhat skeptical.

Fragilities are extremely important in understanding why the world finds it difficult to cope with underlying shifts and shocks.

Global data flows are absolutely exploding across borders and within countries, making globalization in the digital/information realm very different from trade flows, which have plateaued.

India's population is now the same size as China's and is expected to grow by 400-500 million or more over the course of this century, giving India essentially limitless human resource potential, though it has not yet successfully developed as a manufacturing export base despite liberalizing trade in the 1990s.

The combination of a communist political system with a capitalist economy in China inevitably led to explosive corruption because government officials controlled access to land and resources needed by capitalists, who naturally compensated officials for permissions, merging the party and capitalist systems in ways that threatened system legitimacy.

Globalization peaked around 2008 in terms of trade and capital flows as a proportion of world GDP and has not continued to grow at the same rate since, though it has not dramatically reversed—instead trade has become more politicized and regionalized with suspicion toward countries deemed adversaries.

The Biden administration's core diagnosis of what has gone wrong in America—that economic insecurity and erosion of middle-class security have driven political vulnerability to authoritarian demagogues like Trump—is correct and represents an important recognition of a serious problem requiring action.

The rise of China over the past 40 years represents the fastest economic transformation in world history, even faster than the rise of the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and has completely transformed the balance of economic and political power globally.

China will likely remain a central part of global supply chains for the foreseeable future despite de-risking efforts and production diversification, but supply chains will become more Asian and less Chinese as production spreads to countries like India, Vietnam, and Thailand.

The China shock (manufacturing job losses from outsourcing to China) is ancient history—it basically happened in roughly the first decade of this century, and since then the share of manufacturing employment in total US employment has been remarkably stable with no repeat of the extraordinary shift, making efforts to bring back those lost industries likely to be very costly and mostly unproductive.

Economic security should be approached with nuance and subtlety—not all domestic production enhances security (trying to produce adequate domestic supplies of items thought to be unlikely needed, like COVID protective equipment, would likely result in chronically inadequate supplies); diversifying production to friendly countries often provides better security than aiming for complete domestic self-sufficiency.

Industrial policy will not generate the scale of permanent employment that the Biden administration hopes for, will not generate genuinely globally competitive industries without indefinite subsidies, and the amount of resources devoted to it is not large enough to fundamentally reshape the economy where it might have impact on national security.

The real policy problem in the US is not the China shock itself but the failure of the American government to develop place-based adjustment policies that allowed communities and workers in key industries to adjust to these shocks, representing a broader policy error beyond just trade policy.