The trade is mutually beneficial; it's not a zero-sum game that necessarily has winners and losers.
From the trade, we in the USA get cheaper products and low-cost loans/investment.
We then enact counter-productive feel-good policies that make us less competitive:
- employment-depressing labor rules (ranging from minimum wages to complex and expensive mandates)
- corporate welfare (including bailouts)
- subsidies for politically-popular activities (like home ownership and acquisition of often-superfluous academic credentials)
These choices are not the fault of the Chinese. At worst, because our trade with the Chinese makes us wealthier, we can then afford to make bigger mistakes elsewhere before correcting course. We spend the surpluses from trade on our anti-competitive policy luxuries.
"Winning" won't require getting tough on the Chinese, but getting tough on ourselves.
The benefits are very short-term at the cost of long-term benefits, though. We get cheap products now, at the cost of losing our ability to produce them. There are wide ranges of products now that the U.S. no longer knows how to manufacture. Even if we wanted to build factories to produce stuff again, we no longer know how, unless China were willing to lend us experts. And there's an even bigger range of things that would take us 5-10 years to ramp up if we really needed to make them again.
Basically we traded owning our own production for renting production from overseas. Renting often has lower immediate costs but higher long-term costs (and less freedom).
More likely, Chinese leadership has its own set of problems and what happens to the US is tangential, at most just another factor to consider in complex calculations. They are probably indifferent about whether some particular policy of theirs is "creating" or "destroying" jobs in the US, as long as it has its desired domestic effect. That's a completely different thing from a "war" with its focus on the other side and emphasis on "winning" against the other side. Attitudes like yours are knee-jerk, populist, and likely to make the world a worse place than it already is in the future.
Looking like a duck and quacking like a duck doesn't depend on your silly definition of "war." What China is effectively doing is waging war on the US. Whether we wake up to this fact or not will determine whether the US becomes a nation of the rich in fortified castles sitting amongst the poor and desperate, or whether we return to the American Dream.
The US wins economically as the Chinese middle-class grows. What products do you think they will buy when their wages increase - a knock-off phone in Hong Kong or the iPhone 5 or 6?
The market for American goods increases as the Chinese middle class grows. Chinese consumers don't prefer cheap knockoffs, they buy them because they can't afford the most expensive genuine article. Look at the Chinese market for luxury cars as an example of what will happen with increasing speed: http://magazine.wsj.com/features/the-state-of-luxury/cars/
Granted, US car makers aren't in great shape right now, but other industries can take advantage of the Chinese appetite for luxury consumer goods (electronics, cosmetics etc). The elecronics may be manufactured in China, but the profit margins are mainly with the US companies who designed and developed them.
Savvy US companies can sell their goods in increasing volume due to the larger overall global market. Many US multinationals make large chunks of their profit overseas, yet you don't hear people saying the US should enter into trade wars with South America, Europe or Australia.
