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China would be foolish to continue to fight back unless the fight is somehow invisible from US eyes, this is a battle they can't win. Fact is, China took USA manufacturing away from the US consumer so that they could then sell the same products back to them. Without the US consumer China has too few buyers for the manufacturing capacity that they took from the USA and other countries. What they need to do is somehow get domestic consumption up to replace this consumption. Achievable, but it will be slow and will require lots and lots of stimulating the Chinese consumer.
Trump will indeed go to 156% if need be. He won't stop. He is trying to reorganise the USA from a consumer only economy back to a producer and consumer economy like it used to be decades ago. Make America Great Again and all that. A self sufficient economy.
This argument seems like overly one-sided and unrealistic. China is not at warbwith US, but rather is operating as part of a multifaceted global economic structure. United States, for its own benefit, once shifted its production to other countries, including China, where labor costs and raw materials are lower. Now that they are suffering the negative consequences of that decision, They are blaming China.
China's domestic demand is growing every day and they have been focusing on developing their own market for a long time. China is not anymore only export dependable country. And Trump's imposition of this 156% tariff is foolish because American consumers are not willing to buy products at that price and it is no longer possible for them to produce on that scale.
Finally, it can be said that it is not possible to develop a country like China by putting it in a room with a one-sided tariff or by giving cheap talk. Rather, it would be suicide for them.