The U.S. has a better tactical position in the tariff war, but people exaggerate how dependent China is on exports to the U.S. Exports account for less than 20% of China's GDP and have been steadily declining for over a decade; exports accounts for more than 12% of U.S. GDP and have been slowly increasing.

Conservative pundits are living in the 1990s. One reason Obama had to sideline hawks to cut the Iran nuclear deal is because China (among some other countries) made it clear that they were about to walk away from sanctions with Iran unless the U.S. sat down to hammer out a nuclear deal independent of Iran's missile programs. And as Trump's trade war has proven, China was fully prepared to make good on that threat.

Here's a story from yesterday which explains why Beijing made HK Chief Executive Lam apologize to Hong Kong protesters:

https://asia.nikkei.com/Editor-s-Picks/China-up-close/Xi-reverses-Hong-Kong-policy-with-Alibaba-and-North-Korea-in-mind

TL;DR: Beijing is starting to dig in for the long-haul, changing their domestic political strategies with the expectation that they'll need to cut their U.S. export exposure sooner rather than later. Part of that is relaxing their stance toward Hong Kong. (Think about it: they made Lam apologize. That's not only a huge loss of face to her and her administration but to Beijing, and in the calculus of Chinese politics a not insignificant threat to CPC's power.)

Beijing has been carefully managing China's transition to a domestic, consumption-oriented economy since the aughts (2000s). That's the background to the corporate espionage and two steps forward, one step back trade liberalization. Now they're having to accelerate that process; it's not what they wanted, but they're fully prepared to do it over caving to U.S. demands. They're making concessions, just ones that strengthen their tactical position in the tariff war and their long-term strategic position. In effect they're doubling down--the anti-competitive behavior was always a means to an end, and they're recommitting themselves to that end.

That U.S. demands are reasonable is beside the point. Long-term it's China with the winning hand. The irony is that it's the so-called realist conservatives, who proclaim that might makes right is a fact of nature, that fail to see that according their own rules their strategy is doomed to fail.

The U.S. is entering a phase, much like the U.K. before it, of managing its fall from power. If done well (better than the U.K. managed, not they they did an especially bad job of it), the U.S. can minimize the loss of relative strength and maximize its absolute strength, improving the lot of the world in the process. But if we don't accept this basic fact and instead overplay our hand, the consequences will be devastating relative to the best possible outcome--far less relative strength and, at best, treading water in terms of domestic wealth. Right now we're literally hastening our own demise--we're accelerating our descent by setting the stage to prove yet again (after Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, North Korea, etc) our increasing impotence while rapidly depleting the goodwill, structural leverage, and other resources needed to manage the decline.

None of these points are novel, nor even (IMO) seriously contentious. With sober consideration they're all fairly self-evident. But there's a ton of motivated thinking going on in the U.S. right now.