Most stories like these completely misunderstand the issues with american manufacturing.

It's easy to see lower American manufacturing employment and increasing Chinese manufacturing and conclude that American jobs are simply moving to china, but this narrative doesn't hold up to basic scrutiny.

Take for example steel production. American employment in the industry has fallen by 55% since 1989, while chinese production is now 5 times higher. Case closed right? Well no. In that time period, the US built over 40 Million Tons of steel production capacity, 46% of its total capacity. Further, while chinese production has increased dramatically, they are not a major exporter of steel to the US, peaking at 7th largest trading partner in 2015 and currently not even in the top 10. Our biggest steel trading partners are Canada, Mexico, and Brazil.

Looking at the situation more granularly, we see that US steel production has been approximately constant since the early 80s, whereas Chinese steel production didn't ramp up till the 00s, around the same time that the decrease in US steel employment leveled off.

There has been a major shift in how steel is produced over the past few decades. Over this time period, blast furnaces have been shutting down and been replaced with basic oxygen and electric arc furnaces which require less manpower to produce steel. In 1920 it took 3 man hours to produce 1 ton of steel in the US, now 1 man-hour produces 300 tons. Further there have been major shifts in consumption. The US is consuming less steel as most of its infrastrucuture is already built up, and as new products use less steel (either because stronger steels can do more with less or other materials like aluminum and plastics are used instead). China is employing many more steel workers to work less efficient plants, making lower grade steels to fuel its transition into a developed nation.

While this is merely one example, the story is similar in a number of industries - employment goes down in the US, up in China, but there is no decrease in productivity in the US which closely coincides with an increase in production in or exports from China. In general, productivity and capital investment in the US actually remains steady despite shrinking employment, and where there are decreases in productivity, they tend to correlate with reduction of demand, for example in the auto industry.

When people think about automation, they typically picture robots doing what they had been doing. In most industries that hasn't happened, so most people conclude that automation hasn't had any serious impact yet. But the real change is typically in much more mundane process improvement. You don't need as many people to do the same amount of work, and the work that needs doing tends to be different from what was done in the past - more desk jobs and information processing, as well as more low cost unskilled labor, with the blue collar professional in the middle mostly made obsolete. Trade wars with China or subsidies for "onshoring" aren't going to change anything, unfortunately recreating the prosperity of our past will require complicated holistic changes to many sectors, informed by a firm understanding of manufacturing technology and economics.