America doesn’t Need Another Trade War, It Needs to Face the Truth
In the fiery theatre of American politics, it’s become all too easy to cast blame across the Pacific. With the return of Donald Trump to the centre stage of political discourse, the script feels familiar: China is once again the villain behind America’s economic woes. But beneath the soundbites and applause lines lies a more uncomfortable truth—one that cuts through the partisan noise and demands serious self-reflection.
The truth is, the United States is not the victim of Chinese manipulation—it is the architect of its own economic decline.
Since the 1980s, U.S. corporations, with the blessing of successive administrations—Republican and Democrat alike—made a calculated decision to chase profit at the expense of American workers. Factories shuttered. Middle-class communities, once built on steel, cars, and manufacturing, were gutted. Jobs didn’t disappear—they were exported.
To China. To Mexico. To wherever the cost of labour was lowest and the regulations weakest.
And who made these choices? Not the Chinese. Not the Mexicans. American CEOs did. American politicians did. Wall Street did.
The result? A hollowed-out middle class. A working class left to fend for itself. Rising inequality. Crumbling infrastructure. Entire regions addicted not just to opioids, but to the illusion that the American Dream still exists in its old form.
A viral post from a Chinese national recently struck a nerve across social media and offered a searing indictment of the U.S. economic system—not from a place of gloating, but of sobering truth:
“You’re blaming us, but it’s really your own fault. For decades, your oligarchs came and shipped your jobs to China—not for diplomacy, not for peace, but to exploit cheap labour… They hollowed out your middle class, crashed your working class, and told you to be proud. While we reinvested in our people, you got stagnant wages, crippling healthcare costs, and debt. This isn’t China’s fault. This is yours.”
It’s an uncomfortable pill to swallow. The Chinese used the wealth from trade to build high-speed rail, eradicate extreme poverty, and fund public healthcare. America, meanwhile, funnelled its gains into wars, tax loopholes, and stock buybacks. The average American saw none of the dividends—only the decline.
This isn’t a defence of China’s system. But it is a call to Americans to stop scapegoating and start soul-searching.
Trump’s promise of tariffs and trade wars is a Band-Aid on a bullet wound. It won’t rebuild the Rust Belt. It won’t undo forty years of bipartisan negligence. And it certainly won’t restore dignity to America’s forgotten heartland.
If anything, what America needs now is not another slogan, not another foreign boogeyman—it needs a reckoning.
It needs to ask: why were the interests of billionaires prioritised over those of welders, truck drivers, and machinists? Why was a generation told to learn to code while their communities crumbled?
The American working class was not defeated by China. It was abandoned by America.
The revolution this Chinese citizen speaks of is not a violent one—it is a democratic, economic, and moral uprising. One where people reclaim their agency, demand accountability, and force the powerful to reinvest in their own country. Infrastructure. Healthcare. Education. Unions. Dignity.
In short, the fight isn’t over China. The fight is for America—by Americans.
And it’s time to bring it home.
Tu’ifua Vailena
