America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

> China generates over twice as much electricity per person today as the United States. Why?

This appears to be completely wrong? All the stats I can find say that the US has about 4x the per capita electricity generation of China.

Other than that it seems to be mostly good points, especially the overall one: you cannot do this overnight.

> If you’re building a new factory in the United States, your investment will alternate between maybe it will work, and catastrophic loss according to which way the tariffs and the wind blows. No one is building factories right now, and no one is renting them, because there is no certainty that any of these tariffs will last

Policy by amphetamine-driven tweeting is a disaster.

> 12. Enforcement of the tariffs will be uneven and manipulated

Yup. The 145% level seems designed to create smuggling, and the wild variations between countries to create re-labelling. It's chicken tax trucks all over again.

> This is probably the worst economic policy I’ve ever seen

Per Simpsons: this is the worst economic policy you've seen so far. The budget is yet to come.

> If American companies want to sell in China, they must incorporate there, register capital, and name a person to be a legal representative. To sell in Europe, we must register for their tax system and nominate a legal representative. For Europeans and Chinese to sell in the United States, none of this is needed, nor do federal taxes need to be paid.

This is .. not a bad idea, really. It would probably be annoying for small EU and UK exporters but less so than 10% tariffs and even less so than random day of the week tariffs. Maybe one day it could harmonise with the EU VAT system or something.

(also I think the author is imagining that sub-par workers, crime, and drugs don't exist in China, when they almost certainly do, but somewhere out of sight. Possibly due to the internal migration control of hukou combined with media control?)

When I visited China, the expats told me that recreational drug supplychains were strictly compartmentalized. There was the supply of illicit drugs for Westerners (imported by the sons of Nigerian businessmen, the cliche went), the supply of illicit drugs for Chinese people (who only dealt with Chinese people), and then there were the vast array of drugs that are completely legal to get over the counter in China without a prescription (at a pharmacy or CTM shop) that would be controlled substances in a US pharmacy.

That the official line from the CCP was that China had no drug problems, no prostitution, a variety of other things†, and that there were no gay people in China; That these were all Western ailments.

Urban China is a panopticon state not only digitally, but culturally. Housing is much tighter than the US, walls thinner. Your underwear is hung out to dry in clear view. "Privacy" in terms of politeness norms mostly consists of pretending you don't see or hear a thing. Neighbors generally know a lot about what each other are doing. 7% of the population are Party members, and in Marxist-Leninist systems this connotes something closer to earning a military officer commission; The Party is not trivial to apply to, the Party is strictly regimented, Party rules are held above and before the civil law, Party members are expected to be informers and have a strict lawful-good orientation from the perspective of the regime. Penalties for commerce in illicit drugs are even more extreme than the US, and due process is not bound by the same presumptions.

There are lots of factors conspiring against the sort of informal US inner city street drug distribution being as big of a deal in China.

Disclaimer: All my information is more than a decade out of date, and was only ever a thin slice of opinions from mostly Westerners in some first tier cities.

† From an academic paper: "2 The Six Evils are prostitution, drugs, selling women and children, pornography, gambling, and feudal superstition. Criminal gangs, or triads, are often counted as a seventh evil. These vices represent impediments to modernization and throwbacks to social problems that were present prior to the Communist takeover. Elevation of a problem to an "evil" symbolizes that the Beijing regime will mount a "campaign" or "struggle" against it."