So you seem to be arguing there is no benefit to tariffs, and that the supply chain won’t leave china because their biggest customer (by far) has no influence. To make such an argument, your must rely on the rules of classical economics, which assumes a level playing field with honest and open participants.
You also left out the political ramifications of beginning the long slow process of leading the US’s disengagement from China. Our version of the free world will not survive if we don’t, and China’s version is a non starter.
First, I am taking the OP's question literally. When a government enacts a tariff, who pays? It is
always the importer and their customers. Even when tariffs cause pain to the target country, they aren't the one actually paying for the tariff, or the higher costs that result from moving production.
Second, I most certainly am
not relying exclusively on classical economics. E.g. pointing out how China retaliated by targeting Republican constituents is political, not economic.
Third, "the United States" is not one single customer buying from one single producer called "China". There are
hundreds of thousands of US companies buying goods from China, each making their own calculations about the costs of switching supply chains, whether they can balance out Trump's tax breaks and tariffs, and so on.
Fourth, when it comes to pressure, again! That's a two-way street, not one-way. Tariffs resulted in retaliation, which resulted in Trump signing a meaningless deal. Also, we didn't get into how Trump is in a far more precarious position than Xi Jingpeng, who is an authoritarian with significant control over the media and Chinese Internet, and who is running a nation that responds much more effectively to nationalistic appeals than Americans ever have.
As to the idea that there is some sort of moral imperative to control China?
Too late. China is already too affluent, to tied into the global economy, too aggressively courting and tying up other nations, too badly needed by the US for the US to keep a collar on China just with a few tariffs and sniping at Huawei.
Not to mention that this administration is, to put it mildly, completely unequipped to do so. If Trump wanted to keep China in check, probably his last chance to do so was to sign the TPP. Instead, he backed out of it, then started attacking nations that were not only free and democratic, but
our own allies -- including threatening or enacting tariffs on France, China, Mexico and more. No one should be surprised that Trump's "foreign policy" is a contradictory mess, insisting in one breath that the US needs to put its own interests first, and withdrawing from its global responsibilities and ties, and in the same breath insisting that "China is bad, therefore everyone else needs to do what we say." It's so childish, that it is no wonder the rest of the world is passing us by.
To top it all off, Trump is an incompetent autocrat who
dreams of having the same powers and control of the media that Xi has, can't stop himself from complimenting Xi, and is happy to flush our entire electoral system down the drain because he can't face the mere possibility he might lose.
Maybe we need to clean things up at home, before trying to rejoin the TPP and make overtures to the EU and other nations to try and offer a genuine alternative to China....
