Meanwhile, it's only the US that has placed tariffs on China, and they still have a host of other countries that do business with them normally. This is simply an advantage for China.
There's also the fact that China has a lower cost of production compared to the US. The cost of labour in China is also lower than in the US, so the companies won't lose much if tariffs are increased compared to the companies in the US.
yet reality is china closed many factories, workers migrated to places like vietnam, sending chinese cities real estate plummeting down and its retail malls and restaurants with no locals to buy things as they mostly migrated
china certainly is not just able to wait it out unharmed, they are already seeing big losses due to it
China has a ton of real state that is not being used right now because they misscalculated bigly their demographical expectations it seems. I think they just thought people would have tons of kids in the future, but they didn't for whatever reason, and so what you get now is entire cities that are empty. You can go on YouTube and check travel vlog channels, and there's all these videos with youtubers doing trips to empty cities (probably, many of these are paid by chinese traveling agencies to do an advertising campaign about this and get people to move there). The bottomline is that there are simply ghost cities with few people living. But that doesn't mean China doesn't have massive leverage on exports. We are going to see what happens next month when tariff results start being felt by the west as less cargo ships filled with cheap goods arrive.