The trade war with China is heating up. It’s a high-stakes game of chicken, with Trump gambling that China will break first. I think so, too, because the Chinese economy is a giant Potemkin village, and they depend a lot more on our customers than we do on theirs. As part of the trade war, someone in China created a video showing the horror that would descend on America if the Chinese weren’t doing our factory work. The video is both very funny (unintentionally so) and quite revealing.

As Grok explained to me when I asked, “What is the trade imbalance between America and China,” we pour a lot more money into their economy than they do into ours:

As of the most recent data available in 2025, the trade imbalance between the United States and China, specifically for goods, is significant. In 2024, the U.S. goods trade deficit with China was approximately $279.4 billion. This figure is derived from U.S. exports to China totaling around $143.5 billion and U.S. imports from China amounting to about $438.9 billion. This deficit reflects the difference between what the U.S. sells to China and what it buys from China in goods alone, not including services.

Grok also explained to me, when I asked about China’s biggest trade partner, that China doesn’t have a lot of alternatives if America isn’t knocking on the door for its products:

China's biggest customer in terms of exports is the United States. In 2024, the U.S. imported approximately $524.9 billion worth of goods from China, accounting for 14.7% of China's total exports. This makes the United States the largest single-country destination for Chinese exports, surpassing other major trading partners like Hong Kong, Japan, and South Korea.

Both Scott Bessant and Kevin O’Leary explain very clearly how all this plays out:

In other words, while Americans can muddle along without cheap toasters and televisions (they may not like it, but they can do it), China will lose hard cash. Given China’s already parlous financial state, it doesn’t have the resilience to maintain this state of things for very long.

Naturally, China is fighting back with higher tariffs on American goods, which will hurt those manufacturers who sell products to China (mostly Hollywood, I say sarcastically). But, again, over the long term, they need us more than we need them, so the game of chicken favors our will, not theirs.

But China isn’t just fighting with tariffs. There’s a propaganda war going on. It was, therefore, inevitable that someone in China would create this unintentionally revealing video showing depressed, obese Americans struggling to do piecework, whether sewing clothes or assembling electronics. The video received much applause from the potentially violent BlueSky crowd:

(Just as an aside, if you go to Kyle Kulinski’s Blue Sky page, a few things jump out at you: The foaming-at-the-mouth Marxist anger toward Trump and Musk, the barely banked violence, the predominance of the “F” word as the primary means of communication, and the antisemitism.)

However, this Chinese video isn’t the wonder the BlueSkyers think it is. Instead, it’s more of a self-own.

First, of course, the video shows exactly what the Chinese people think of their best customers: We are fat, slow, and incompetent. It’s really never a good idea to insult the customer. I’m certainly less inclined to enrich people who demean me this way.

Second, the video gives us a glimpse into Chinese factories. In China, piecework hasn’t changed much since the sweatshops of old New York more than 100 years ago: Rows of people in a depressing room laboring with antiquated machines. It’s entirely possible that Americans, who, thanks to Henry Ford, pioneered the assembly line, can do better.

Third, once again, the Democrats show their abiding love for slavery, which is what’s happening in China. That system uses actual slave labor, and even those factory workers who aren’t slaves are not benefiting from a system that’s oligarch-oriented, not worker-oriented. In other words, this is not the surging 20th-century American economy, which saw everyone’s standard of living rise. Instead, it’s the flatline that was the world economy before the free market began, one marked by a small cadre of very rich people living off a vast mass of laborers who will never rise above their abysmal station.

If you want to persuade Americans, insulting them and showing the terrible conditions of your own workers really isn’t the way to go. On X, users outside of the Stygian depths of woke madness were appropriately dismissive of the video:

As a random bonus to this post, here’s the factory scene from 1957’s The Pajama Game, a musical (with some really good music) about factory workers trying to get a 7.5-cent-per-hour raise from a corrupt factory manager who is embezzling from the company:

Image: X screen grab.