> This measures output in dollars, which is an absolutely useless metric since China’s manufacturing appeal lies in its ability to undercut every other country on earth in its cost to quality ratio.

Of course it's in absolute dollar terms and I pointed that out in the comment repeatedly to pre-empt retort comments that would inevitably attempt to focus incorrectly on that. I also pointed out that Asia produces more units for the same reason, to pre-empt the need to waste time on someone posing that attempted retort.

It's the exact opposite of useless. You just tried to pretend that high-value manufacturing is useless by claiming that low-value high-volume manufacturing is what matters. Be sure to let Germany and Japan know that their high-value manufacturing is useless. It doesn't even warrant a serious rebuttal it's so clearly wrong. Japan is just off the coast of China and yet China has been entirely unable to take their high-value manufacturing position away from them despite the past several decades of trying.

If China were so impossible to compete with as you're claiming, their share of global manufacturing would not have stagnated for years prior to the pandemic. They have lost their ability to easily undercut everyone else on a cost + quality ratio. In fact leading up to the pandemic they were losing manufacturing on a cost + quality ratio to other regional competitors.

That's why Samsung was able to relocate half of their smartphone manufacturing to Vietnam. Vietnam was able to undercut China on a cost + quality basis. There is nothing special about what China does such that no other nations can replicate it (whether Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, Mexico, India, et al.).

> If you can make, say, a screwdriver in the US for $2/unit, you can make 50 in China for the same cost. But if the US makes 1 million and one screwdrivers and China makes 50 million, then technically the US has higher manufacturing output since the dollar total is higher.

That's an entirely fake premise you're staging (and I don't mean the specific example you gave, the wider premise is fake). In instances where there's an enormous cost imbalance, the US offshores low value manufacturing, such that the US isn't going to manufacture $50 screwdrivers when they can be made at 85%-95% the same quality for $1 or $2 in China. That's what the manufacturing flight to China was all about 10-30 years in the past. You're merely providing support for my core point: the US, Europe and Japan dominate high-value manufacturing (which is where the high dollar manufacturing totals derive from), not high cost screwdriver manufacturing. Germany isn't generating its $700 billion in manufacturing output through the manufacture of $50 screwdrivers (or the equivalent) when they can outsource that to Eastern Europe or China for a dollar. Nobody does that today or can afford to do that today, given it's a hyper competitive global economy.

The US-China trade imbalance overwhelmingly consists of low-value high-volume widgets. That huge wall of imports largely consists of $1 screwdrivers. The same exact situation exists across Europe as well. Where China can undercut on cost + quality, they have; if they could take any and all manufacturing so easily, they would have (they can't).

China is rapidly losing its textile crown as another example of your premise being incorrect. Precisely because they're not always able to compete effectively on cost + quality and are susceptible to being undercut as their labor costs will persistently climb. Textiles are gradually fleeing China for better cost + quality ratios (which is exactly what happened to the US across the 20th century as textiles fled from US shores and went to Asia, due to a weakening cost + quality proposition centered on labor costs).

Via Google you'll find a large number of business stories covering China's eroding textile dominance going back across the past decade, as other competitors with superior cost + quality ratios take their market share -

2018: "China’s once-booming textile and clothing industry faces tough times"

"China’s market share by value in the global textile and clothing industry fell from 38.6 per cent in 2015 to 35.8 per cent in 2016, with a downward trend in major apparel importing regions such as the US, European Union and Japan."

"Since 2014, exports of Chinese textiles and clothing have declined sharply from about US$236 billion in 2014 to US$206 billion in 2016, according to the World Trade Organisation.

"Chinese customs data showed exports of clothes and accessories fell by 0.4 per cent last year from 2016, while textiles exports saw annual growth of 4.5 per cent last year."

"Meanwhile, labour costs in China have been rising steadily. The minimum wage in the southern boomtown of Shenzhen is now about US$336 per month – more than double the rate in some Southeast Asian countries."

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/economy/article/2143938/chin...